Comparing Obama and JFK

Unlike Kennedy Technocrats, Obamist Class Warriors Run Economy Into the Abyss

2010-02-05T18:46:00.001-08:00

Despite some fairly grandiose undertakings, including the moonshot, JFK was generally prudent with the pursestrings, and economically savvy. For example, he cut taxes to stimulate the economy, and was rewarded with increased overall revenues, much as Ronald Reagan did two decades later.

President Obama, by contrast, appears to be economically clueless, and is running the economy into the ground. Economic forecaster Gerald Celente tells a reporter in this video that the Obama national debt has now metastasized such that it will "never" be paid off, and that a very serious depression is in the offing as the capital markets react to that.

Gerald Celente : The Debt Is Never Going to be Paid Off, Raising the Debt Ceiling is Just a Stimulus Cover-up

Gerald Celente on Russia Today to speak about the debt problem

The House voted to increase to the legal debt limit to $14.3 trillion. Another way of describing it is that the House voted to allow the government to go $1.9 trillion deeper in debt - or about $6,000 more for every U.S. resident. The Senate approved a similar measure last week and the bill will now go to President Barack Obama and be signed into law. If Congress doesn't hike the debt ceiling, the U.S. would be unable pay Social Security and Medicare payments.

Trends Expert Gerald Celente is regarded as one of the foremost trend predictors in the world. This author of Trends 2000 and Trend Tracking, and publisher of The Trends Journal, is frequently a guest on television news and talk show programs.

What is a Pathological Narcissist?

2010-01-26T19:55:00.000-08:00

Was JFK a narcissist? He was certainly adulterous and seemed to suffer from some sort of a sexual addiction, but he was capable of self-criticism, and received external criticism without reflexively
going on the attack. He didn't habitually misrepresent his earlier statements and positions, and he was prospectively pragmatic.

Joy Tiz writes in this Canada Free Press column that President Obama displays many of the telltale signs of pathological narcissism. I'm not entirely certain I agree with her diagnosis of the president's mental state, but she has given us some things to watch for.

The malignant narcissist carries a messianic vision of himself and is prone to magical thinking
Never Laugh at a Narcissist
By Joy Tiz
In 2008, America elected her first celebrity president. So pronounced was Barack Obama’s status as a pop culture celebrity that former rival John McCain ran ads comparing Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, two pop icons famous for their fame rather than their accomplishments.
A less qualified presidential candidate would have been hard to find. Yet Obama was not only a serious candidate and ultimate victor, but during his campaign, he pranced around, acting as if he already was president and the election was merely a ceremony to formalize his taking of the crown.

Narcissism is a personality disorder, meaning a cluster of traits that endure over time and, literally, are part of the individual’s personality. These traits go to the very core of the person’s identity; they are not transient or situational. The term “narcissism” is being mentioned in the media quite a lot recently, not only due in no small part to the election of Obama, but also because many experts believe that our culture, particularly youth culture, is becoming increasingly narcissistic.

Dr. Sam Vaknin describes the “malignant narcissist” as having pathological narcissism. The pathological narcissist will subtly misrepresent facts, or what we call in the political context, a flip-flop. Lacking a solid core of principles makes it easy to switch positions as required.
The malignant narcissist carries a messianic vision of himself and is prone to magical thinking; that is, he ignores data that conflicts with his fantasy.

Narcissists are high-maintenance creatures with little hope of changing. The personality disorder is baked into them. Barack Obama shows the thin-skinned nature of the narcissist in his responses to criticism. Narcissists also have no intestinal fortitude for ridicule. Not only does Barack Obama lash out at critics, he is entirely devoid of the kind of self-deprecating humor that can be so endearing in people in power.

Obama’s mentor, Saul Alinsky understood the use of ridicule as a weapon: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule.” (Rules for Radicals, Pg. 128).

Early in his presidency, Obama chose Rush Limbaugh as his target of choice. The mission is to get the enemy to react, which gives the revolutionary a measure of power and control over the prey. Alinsky doesn’t address this directly, but it would seem prudent to avoid selecting targets that are smarter than you are. Limbaugh deftly and entirely predictably turned Obama’s provocation into a ratings bonanza.

“The narcissist, though, rarely engages in self-directed, self-deprecating humour. If he does, he expects to be contradicted, rebuked and rebuffed by his listeners (Come on, you are actually quite handsome!), or to be commended or admired for his courage or for his wit and intellectual acerbity (I envy your ability to laugh at yourself!). As everything else in a narcissist’s life, his sense of humour is deployed in the interminable pursuit of Narcissistic Supply.”

For all of the narcissist’s grandiosity, he is driven by a relentless need to pursue and maintain a source of narcissistic supply.

“Yet, to obtain Narcissistic Supply, one must be taken seriously and to be taken seriously one must be the first to take oneself seriously. Hence the gravity with which the narcissist contemplates himself. This lack of levity and of perspective and proportion characterise the narcissist and set him apart.”

Narcissists are a volatile bunch, and people who live with them eventually find themselves on the receiving end of narcissistic rage when His Specialness feels a threat to his supply.

“Narcissists can be imperturbable, resilient to stress, and sangfroid. Narcissistic rage is not a reaction to stress – it is a reaction to a perceived slight, insult, criticism, or disagreement (in other words, to narcissistic injury). It is intense and disproportional to the ‘offence’.” Not unlike going on a rampage against Fox News or the banks.

“On the narcissist’s cosmic scale, the daily vagaries of life, the mundane, the routine are not important, even damagingly distracting. This is the source of his feeling of exceptional entitlement. Surely, engaged as he is in benefiting humanity through the exercise of his unique faculties - the narcissist deserves special treatment!”

“This is the source of his violent swings between opposite behaviour patterns and between devaluation and idealisation of others. To the narcissist, every minor development is nothing less than a portentous omen, every adversity is a conspiracy to upset his progress, every setback an apocalyptic calamity, every irritation the cause for outlandish outbursts of rage.”

“The narcissist will tell you it’s good to be able to laugh at oneself,  But they never do. They laugh at other people.”

Joy Tiz, Joytiz.com, born in Chicago, recalls when many democrats were actually normal people who were just wrong about everything. She has a law degree and an M.Sc. in psychology. Joy has written extensively about current events and politics. She writes for Canada Free Press. Joy’s latest book, Obamanutz: A Cult Leader Takes the White House provides an unblinking look at who Barack Obama is and what forces propelled him into the White House.
Email: joy@joytiz.com
Twitter at: Joytiz

Did Bill Ayers Write President Obama’s Book?

2009-11-27T20:05:00.000-08:00

Like JFK, Pres. Obama owed his gravitas in part, as he entered the presidential primaries, to his reputation as a serious author. JFK received the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage; Pres. Obama's books are Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope.

And like JFK, Pres. Obama is accused of falsifying his claim of authorship. It is not unusual for a major politician to collaborate with a "ghostwriter," but Pres. Obama claimed in a July 2008 meeting in Fairfax, Virginia, that "I actually wrote [the two books] myself." JFK was never confronted about his authorship, but his aide Ted Sorenson eventually came clean and admitted he wrote Profiles in Courage.

Sorenson admitted to the Wall Street Journal in May 2008 that he “did a first draft of most chapters” for JFK, “helped choose the words of many of its sentences” and “privately boasted or indirectly hinted that I had written much of the book.”

"In other words," writes Alexandria, Va. blogger James Joyner, "[Sorenson] wrote the book, [JFK] did some very late editing, and claimed it as his own work." Sorensen told the Journal that in 1957 — just after the book won a Pulitizer Prize — JFK “unexpectedly and generously offered, and I happily accepted, a sum” for [Sorensen’s] work on the book.

Did Bill Ayers Write Obama’s Book? Author Jack Cashill, among others, has analyzed the writing in Dreams From My Father and concluded that it was written by former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. There is other, non-literary evidence that Cashill is correct about Ayers' authorship, adduced here in an article posted on the Accuracy in Media website.

Also-rans Passed Over for Nobel Prize

2009-10-10T11:08:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to President Obama, for winning the Nobel Peace Prize! And too bad for JFK, who never got one, and for all you "also-rans" (losing nominees), whom Mary Catherine Ham catalogs below in a Weekly Standard article. I'm sure you do great work, but you just need a little more charisma and star power, or Oprah on speed dial.

Meet the People Who Were Passed Over for Obama
by Mary Katharine Ham

Sima Samar, women's rights activist in Afghanistan: "With dogged persistence and at great personal risk, she kept her schools and clinics open in Afghanistan even during the most repressive days of the Taliban regime, whose laws prohibited the education of girls past the age of eight. When the Taliban fell, Samar returned to Kabul and accepted the post of Minister for Women's Affairs."

Ingrid Betancourt: French-Colombian ex-hostage held for six years."

Dr. Denis Mukwege: Doctor, founder and head of Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo. He has dedicated his life to helping Congolese women and girls who are victims of gang rape and brutal sexual violence."

Handicap International and Cluster Munition Coalition: "These organizations are recognized for their consistently serious efforts to clean up cluster bombs, also known as land mines. Innocent civilians are regularly killed worldwide because the unseen bombs explode when stepped upon."

Hu Jia, a human rights activist and an outspoken critic of the Chinese government, who was sentenced last year to a three-and-a-half-year prison term for 'inciting subversion of state power.'"

Wei Jingsheng, who spent 17 years in Chinese prisons for urging reforms of China's communist system. He now lives in the United States."

Obama Nobel Prize Jokes

2009-10-09T19:53:00.001-07:00

Best Obama-Nobel Jokes - George's Bottom Line

JFK never got a Nobel Prize, despite deftly avoiding nuclear war with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Nobel may be one of the few that his dad Joe Kennedy couldn't buy or finagle for him. But grade inflation has arrived, and now Jimmy Carter and Al Gore have one, Yasir Arafat had one, so why not President Obama? Like Carter and Gore, President Obama has a thinly disguised contempt for America and Americans, and Europeans find this an irresistable quality. Here, former Clinton lieutenant George Stephanopoulous assembles some of the best zingers on the subject.

President Obama at War With His Generals

2009-09-27T18:05:00.000-07:00

JFK overruled his generals on the Cuban Missile Crisis, not to mention the Bay of Pigs.

Now President Obama is overruling his generals in Afghanistan, including the general he placed there because he didn't like the commander he had there before. There are differences: JFK made his decision and accepted the consequences. President Obama is trying to get the generals to take responsibility for his decision, and to provide cover for him. JFK encouraged his generals to communicate freely with him; he just reserved the final decision for himself. The U.S. general in Afghanistan is finding his advice unwelcome in the White House.

The Sipsey Street Irregulars blog actually described it as "Obama at War With His Generals."
http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2009/09/i-hate-being-right-obama-at-war-with.html

According to The Tension: Veritas Vincit blog, Gen. Stanley McChrystal wants 30,000-40,000 more troops (net) in the Afghanistan theater, and has warned that without additional boots on the ground by next year, the mission could fail. Yet Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he will not present the troop request to Obama until the White House completes a review of strategy over the next "few weeks." http://thetension.blogspot.com/2009/09/wire-mccain-says-mcchrystal-seeking.html.

Prairie Pundit blog reports that McChrystal said he has only spoken once with the President in 70 days. http://prairiepundit.blogspot.com/2009/09/mcchrystal-not-defrayed-from-troop.html#comment-form.

Bob Woodward reports in the Washington Post that President Obama's military advisor, retired Gen. James Jones, says McChrystal's troop request is premature. "The bumper sticker here is strategy before resources," Jones told Woodward. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/26/AR2009092602685.html.

Jones says the president has five policy sessions scheduled over the next few weeks to determine Afghanistan strategy. The outcome of those meetings might moot Gen. McChrystal's troop request, according to Jones.

Unilateral Civility: Only Obamists Get Pass for Bombast, Vulgarity

2009-09-03T19:30:00.001-07:00

I am hard pressed to recall any JFK appointee who was (publicly) foul-mouthed, or openly bigoted. President Obama used a call for civility to defang opponents on hot-button issues like abortion and gay rights, but has implicitly encouraged his supporters to denounce his adversaries as robustly as they want, and he does not condemn his supporters' over-the-top rhetoric.

This is not difficult to understand. With the mass media's complicity, the president has been able to impose unequal terms - what I call unilateral civility. Conservatives are required to be on their best behavior; libertines and collectivists can let 'er rip. The outcome is never in doubt so long as Conservatives accept these terms. (The Obamists' loathing of the health plan protesters is based not so much on ideological differences as on the protesters' rejection of unilateral civility ground rules.)

The President appeared to demonstrate his comfort level with homosexual supporters' filthy language, including sexually graphic conversation with school-age children, when he nominated Kevin Jennings to a Department of Education post this summer, as Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe & Drug-Free Schools.

Obama Nominates Foul-Mouthed Homosexual Activist and Anti-Christian Bigot
by Peter J. Smith

WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews.com) - Although President Barack Obama has advocated speaking "fair minded words" in debating differences on major ethical issues, his recent nominee to the Department of Education's Office of Safe & Drug Free Schools is a homosexual activist with a history of using foul and abusive language against those who have opposed his homosexualist agenda.

Kevin Jennings, the founder of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN), was recently appointed to the Obama Administration as Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe & Drug Free Schools, which is under the Department of Education led by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

During Jennings's tenure as the Executive director of GLSEN, the organization sponsored a Tufts University conference called "TeachOut" in March 2000. The conference was co-sponsored by the Massachusetts Department of Education; but the event has been described by pro-family organizations familiar with the conference as "fistgate" for its extremely graphic and detailed workshops to teenagers about the mechanics and variations of homosexual intercourse.

The Massachusetts watchdog group, MassResistance, includes on its website a number of graphic quotations from homosexual presenters, who instigated equally graphic conversations on homosexual sex with youth there. MassResistance says they will be releasing a tape of the event to the public later this week. (WARNING: extremely graphic content discussed here <http://www.massresistance.org/docs/issues/fistgate/index.html>)

Around the same time, Jennings was quoted in Marble Collegiate Church as saying members of the "religious right" were "hard core bigots" who comprised about 20 percent of the electorate.

"We have to quit being afraid of the religious right. We also have to quit - I'm trying to find a way to say this. I'm trying not to say, 'F**k 'em!' which is what I want to say, because I don't care what they think!" Jennings told his audience, which pealed with laughter. "Drop dead!"

According to Americans for Truth, Jennings and GLSEN never repudiated the actions of homosexual activists at the "Teach Out" conference, but instead attacked Scott Whiteman, the Massachusetts parent who video-recorded the proceedings, for violating students' privacy.

"Anti-religious bigots should not be setting policy for schools - and promoting dangerous sex and gender identities to youth is the antithesis of 'safety,'" stated Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth.

"Jennings should have been drummed out of public policy years ago for GLSEN's role in the awful Fistgate scandal that corrupted Boston youth," LaBarbera stated. "But instead the GLSEN founder is now being elevated to one of the most important roles in U.S. education policy."

LaBarbera continued, "Americans For Truth will educate Americans on Jennings' and GLSEN's dangerous agenda, and we will work with other pro-family and parental rights groups across the country - and Obama voters who oppose pro-homosexual indoctrination in schools - to urge that the Jennings appointment be withdrawn."

Obama to honor Sen. Kennedy at funeral Mass (OneNewsNow.com)

2009-08-30T18:33:00.001-07:00

Obama to honor Sen. Kennedy at funeral Mass (OneNewsNow.com)

Shared via AddThis

Miles Says Obama Must Attack Somali Pirate Bases

2009-04-16T20:22:00.000-07:00

Can anybody imagine JFK traveling overseas to disparage his own countrymen, or to assure Mohammedans that America does not consider itself a Christian country?
Would Kennedy have waved off reporters' questions about an American hostage in harm's way, and insisted on droning on about pork-barrel politics instead? The contrast between President Kennedy and President Obama hasnever seemed starker than this week.

Retired Green Beret Jim Miles analyzed President Obama's response to the initial Somali pirate incident, brought to a conclusion by Navy SEAL
sharpshooters earlier this week.
One of his predictions has already been disproved: the epidemic of
Somali piracy on the high seas was not subdued by the rescue earlier
this week. Rather, Somali pirates have rallied to commandeer multiple additional U.S. ships. However, Miles did prescribe the proper response to such a contingency later in his post. It will be interesting to see his
remarks on the multiple attacks which came later this week.

It is interesting to note that the President's militant Muslim
family members in Kenya are ethnic Somalis, not Swahili-speaking Kenyans. The President is quite sentimental about his African kinsmen, and has written of his loyalty and commitment to them, and to Muslims in general. It must personally difficult for him to act decisively against the Somali menace.

Here is Jim Miles' post in his blog Hipshot from earlier this week.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Navy Seals takeout Somali pirates

When we first heard about the Somali pirates holding American freighter Capt. Richard Phillips hostage in a small boat my wife angrily exclaimed, "A bunch of pirates forces America on it's knees! Where are Special Forces or Navy Seals?"

I thought at the time she summed it up well. America appeared to be on its knees and where in the hell were our special ops? As a retired Green Beret I knew that somewhere in or near the immediate area off the coast of Somalia the US Military was standing by to rescue the good captain. Standing by for orders from the new president.

This was a test for President Obama and his administration. Would he order a rescue attempt? Authorize the use of military force? The world was watching.

He had just made his first foreign visit telling world leaders what an arrogant country America was and bashing his own country in the process. When asked about the incident by reporters Obama said he was discussing housing and dismissed them with a wave of his hand. So much for looking out for an American being held hostage by a bunch of armed, Somali thugs.

I thought President Reagen gave the best definition of foreign policy and national defense when he said, "Our foreign policy should be based on the principle that we will go anywhere and do anything that has to be done to protect our citizens from unjust treatment. Our national defense policy should back that up with force."

Can't be any plainer and to the point than that. Although it seems that just about everyone in the Obama administration is either a buffoon or a tax cheat he must have a few top-level advisers with common sense. I'm sure someone, a military type, advised the president that it was time to quit pussyfooting around and authorize the use of military force in dealing with the pirates. A voice whispered in his ear, "Now is the time to appear Reaganesque, Mr. President. Give the order and let the military carry it out, Sir."

"Dingy" Harry Reid and Nancy "Birdbrain" Pelosi and their gang of losers and traitors, including the smartest woman in the world Hillary Clinton, probably reacted to the use of force with an "OMG, I can't believe he authorized the Navy to kill those poor, unfortunate pirates. How terrible. What will the world think?"

Who gives a rat's butt what the rest of the world thinks? You can bet the scumbag Somali pirates will think twice before attacking one of our ships on the high seas again.

Regardless of world opinion, U.S. Navy SEALs deserve medals for taking out three Somali scumbags with three well placed sniper shots and wounding a fourth in the successful rescue of Captain Phillips. Way to go Navy Seals!

President Obama, finally in authorizing the use of military force, acted like a Commander In Chief. And it works every time it's used if the president issues the order and then lets the military do its job without undue interference from the White House.

It worked when Reagan sent the US military into Grenada to rescue US students in Grenada in 1983. And it worked when President Bush One sent US troops into Panama and toppled Noriega and again in Desert Storm One to oust the Iraqi military from Kuwait. And it's been working in Iraq and Afghanistan in spite of the "cut-and-run" policies of congressional Democrats.

The Korean War, 1950-53, was our first "no-win war" where it was okay to fight and die but not to win, because it might start a bigger war. Truman fired Gen. MacArthur for insisting on winning a war. In Vietnam we just "cut and run" after winning all the battles.

President Johnson bragged to reporters that the Air Force "can't bomb an outhouse in North Vietnam without my approval." As a result of micromanaging the Korean and Vietnam Wars from the White House we now have a nut case in North Korea threatening to nuke everyone and a bunch of armed communist thugs running things in Vietnam.

The Carter administration made the same mistake in the failed operation to rescue US hostages in Iran. "Give the order then get the hell out of the way" is a winning policy.

The failure of the US military operation in the Mogadishu, Somalia under the Clinton administration (Black Hawk Down) is another stark example of failed leadership from the White House. In October, 1993, a 440 man US Delta force launched an operation against Somali Warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid and his rebel force. Outnumbered and refused reinforcements the Delta force suffered heavy casualties in a seventeen hour battle that resulted in eighteen killed and eighty-four wounded.

The bodies of dead American soldiers were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu and seen on TV around the world. Clinton responded by withdrawing US troops from Somalia. Another "cut-and-run" debacle.

The next move for the Obama administration, now that the Somali riffraff has threatened to start killing hostages in retaliation for the deaths of the three pirates, is to order military air strikes on Somali targets including pirate vessels. The only thing these scumbags understand is military force. Every time they hijack a ship we strike a target in Somalia.

The Obama administration should request, in no uncertain terms, other nations join the US in conducting joint military operations against Somali pirates and their bases in Somalia. The "speak softly but carry a big stick" policy worked well for Teddy Roosevelt.

However, in the end it will be up to the US to lead the charge.The time has also come for merchant shipping to start arming their crews or hire armed security. The US Navy has shown that shooting and killing pirates has a dampening effect on hijacking ships and taking hostages, especially when its a US ship.

The Obama defense team has a chance to institute a "talk softly but carry a big stick" policy in dealing with Somalia and its bunch of pirates. A douse of superior US military firepower would definitely send the right message. Let's hope the new president is listening.

Obama consolidates power, reduces do-gooders to his discipline

2009-03-09T22:19:00.000-07:00

JFK was a tax cutter, and in fact Ronald Reagan's tax cuts 20 years later were inspired in part by the Kennedy tax cuts and resulting prosperity of the early 1960s.

No danger of confusing President Obama with JFK here. He is not only increasing taxes robustly, but cutting the deductions allowed for charitable contributions. This is not mere revenue generation, but consolidation of power in the national government at the expense of private philanthropy - especially churches and parachurch organizations - which compels further dependency on government officials, and potentially yields a large, loyal patronage constituency where once potential rivals lurked.

Princeton professor Robert George has observed that socialism is not merely antithetical to individualism, but it is an attack on "mediating civic institutions," such as the family and the church. When collectivists' ambitions ambitions approach the totalitarian, there's not enough room on this planet for government and church and family. In the long run, such totalitarians cannot tolerate independent families or churches, and come to view them as incubators for resistance.

American Leftists couldn't openly oppress church and family a generation ago, but times have changed. They are now in full control of the media (see yesterday's post about "media malpractice"), so there is no watchdog to hold them accountable. The electorate has been so thoroughly dumbed down (see yesterday's post for URL for filmmaker John Ziegler's exit interviews of 2008 voters) that electoral accountability becomes less likely with each passing day. Triumphal Leftists are casting off restraint now as the Democratic regime settles in.

As an example, legislators in Connecticut recently proposed a bill to remove Catholic Church property from the custody of its bishops, and to require that it be held by laymen. This is transparently an act of retaliation and intimidation of the church because it dares to oppose homosexual marriage. The Latter Day Saints are incurring similar intimidation in California, for the same reason.

Already Catholic Charities has been driven out of the child adoption business in Massachusetts by homosexualists. If President Obama and his allies are not restrained, there will be soon be no refuge for Christian philanthropy - or Christian conscience - in the U.S.

The Death of Journalism

2009-03-09T21:35:00.000-07:00

JFK unquestionably was better liked in the media than his Republican opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon. And television was kind to him because he struck a more attractive figure than Nixon. After the Kennedy-Nixon debate, famously, most radio listeners thought Nixon had won, while most who watched it on television thought Kennedy won.

Although there was some gauze-focused, syrupy coverage of the Kennedy "Camelot" in the White House, and a lot of understandably nostalgic retrospective coverage after his assassination, the news media played campaign coverage "down the middle," for the most part, and comedians had no significant persuasive role yet.

Half a century later, the news media were openly partisan in favor of Obama, and if the large news organizations took their role more seriously than Jon Stewart or Saturday Night Live's Tina entertainers, it was often difficult to distinguish. Documentary filmmaker John Ziegler calls it "media malpractice," and says that we have witnessed "the death of journalism."

It appears from this exit poll that dysfunctional public education and vapid, self-indulgent news practices have combined to produce a smug, opinionated, but disastrously ignorant electorate. http://www.howobamagotelected.com/assets/videos/interviews.html.

Obama Replaces Vulgar Jeremiah Wright with Homosexual Bishop

2008-11-13T18:05:00.000-08:00

J.F.K. and Barack Obama both affiliated closely with clergymen - Kennedy with cold warrior Cardinal Spellman, and Obama with liberation theologian Jeremiah Wright. Obama denounced Wright after his mentor persisted in embarrassing him during the primary campaign. This article reports that he has replaced Wright with homosexual Episcopalian bishop Eugene Robinson, who has provoked numerous congregations to leave his denomination.
Activist: 'Pastor to presidents' replaced by gay bishop
by Jim Brown

OneNewsNow

A conservative Christian activist says it's a sad omen for the Obama administration and the United States that Barack Obama has been seeking guidance from the Episcopal Church's first openly homosexual bishop.

The Times of London reports that the president-elect sought out New Hampshire homosexual bishop Vicki Gene Robinson for advice three times during his presidential campaign. Robinson, whose ordination in the Episcopal Church has caused a deep rift within the Anglican Communion, was reportedly sought out by Obama to discuss what it feels like to be "first."

Robinson notes in their three private conversations, Obama voiced his support for "equal civil rights" for homosexuals and described the election as a "religious experience."

Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, believes Obama's consultations with Robinson show the true tenor of his upcoming administration. "It looks like Billy Graham has been replaced by a gay bishop. We're moving to, perhaps, our first anti-Christian president; it's beyond post-Christian. Gene Robinson advocates homosexuality as part of the Christian experience," he explains. "Now Bible-believing Christians cannot accept that. Homosexual practice is sinful, as taught by the scriptures. This man [Obama] pretends to be faithful to Christianity, even as he works very hard to undermine it."

LaBarbera suggests Robinson may possibly replace Jeremiah Wright as one of Obama's main spiritual advisers. Wright was Obama's Chicago pastor for 20 years before disassociating with the controversial preacher during the presidential campaign.

Obama plays masterful Edgar Bergen to the church's Charlie McCarthy

2008-10-29T07:57:00.001-07:00

John F. Kennedy made a financial contribution to fellow anti-communist and WWII Navy veteran Richard M. Nixon when, early in his political career, Nixon was running against a Democrat who was soft on Communism. Some have attributed this to cynical motives, but in all likelihood this contribution predated both men's cynicism, and thus expressed genuine solidarity against Communism and its enablers in the American Left.

Barack Obama, by contrast, has unmistakable Marxist impulses and can be described without caricature as a disciple of Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals. But Obama, too, is aware of the advantages of straying across the line to forage in Conservative orchards. The Obama campaign recognized early on that the Left has no credibility with centrist Americans under its own name, owing to decades of condescension and outright hostility to American religion, mores and working-class culture.

With only a brief, quickly suppressed gaffe that disparaged white Pennsylvanians for "clinging" to their guns and churches, the Obama machine has exercised remarkable message discipline by co-opting the Christian label, and has used social conservatives' language to soften the distinctions that will be painfully evident once Obama appoints his cabinet and nominates his judges.

The Black Church has apparently put itself entirely at the disposal of the Obama campaign. But Obama has also made major inroads in the white evangelical and Catholic communities. He has drawn endorsements from former pro-life stalwarts Douglas Kmiec and Frankie Schaeffer, and a divorced white Florida name-it-and-claim-it Megachurch preacher couple who will go unnamed here.

This was possible, of course, only with the collaboration of Obama's confederates in the mass media. The New York Times, for example, has mastered the technique of putting Leftist words in conservatives' mouths, often by identifying apostates as conservatives long after they cross over to make separate peace with the Left.

The Times article about the Supreme Court's Heller decision last week is a case in point:

October 21, 2008
Ruling on Guns Elicits Rebuke From the Right
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — Four months after the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess guns, its decision is under assault — from the right.
Two prominent federal appeals court judges say that Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in the case, District of Columbia v. Heller, is illegitimate, activist, poorly reasoned and fueled by politics rather than principle. The 5-to-4 decision in Heller struck down parts of a District of Columbia gun control law.

The judges used what in conservative legal circles are the ultimate fighting words: They said the gun ruling was a right-wing version of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that identified a constitutional right to abortion. Justice Scalia has said that Roe had no basis in the Constitution and amounted to a judicial imposition of a value judgment that should have been left to state legislatures.

Comparisons of the two decisions, then, seemed calculated to sting.

“The Roe and Heller courts are guilty of the same sins,” one of the two appeals court judges, J. Harvie Wilkinson III, wrote in an article to be published in the spring in The Virginia Law Review.

Similarly, Judge Richard A. Posner, in an article in The New Republic in August, wrote that Heller’s failure to allow the political process to work out varying approaches to gun control that were suited to local conditions “was the mistake that the Supreme Court made when it nationalized abortion rights in Roe v. Wade.”

Sharp criticism of a recent Supreme Court decision by federal appeals court judges is quite unusual, though these two judges — both Reagan appointees — are more outspoken than most.
Judge Wilkinson, who sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., was recently considered for a spot on the Supreme Court. Judge Posner, of the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, is perhaps the most influential judge not on the Supreme Court.
Not all conservatives agree with the critics, of course. Robert A. Levy, a libertarian lawyer who was a principal architect of the victorious strategy in the Heller case, rejected the comparison to Roe.

The two sides in the Heller case claimed to rely on the original meaning of the Second Amendment, based on analysis of its text in light of historical materials. The amendment says, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

The more liberal justices said the amendment protected only a collective right tied to state militias, thus allowing most gun control laws. The more conservative justices found an individual right and struck down parts of a District of Columbia gun control law.

In Judge Wilkinson’s view, the upshot of the court’s extensive historical analysis was that “both sides fought into overtime to a draw.”

Others said the quality of the combat was low. “Neither of the two main opinions in Heller would pass muster as serious historical writing,” Jack Rakove, a historian at Stanford, wrote on the blog Balkinization soon after the decision was issued.

The strong reaction from the right after Heller was preceded, with a sort of symmetry, by liberal support for an individual-rights reading of the Second Amendment. For much of the 20th century, the conventional view of the amendment had been that it only protects a collective right. (Warren E. Burger, after retiring as chief justice in 1986, called the individual rights view “one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word ‘fraud’ — on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen.”)

But some prominent liberal law professors, including Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard, Akhil Reed Amar of Yale and Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas, have concluded, sometimes reluctantly, that the amendment in fact protects an individual right. Professor Levinson’s seminal 1989 article in The Yale Law Journal captured the tone of the enterprise. It was called “The Embarrassing Second Amendment.”

In an interview, Professor Levinson said, “The result in Heller is eminently respectable.” But he added that he understood why some conservatives were upset. “People say the Roe court was too interventionist,” he said. “So is the Heller court from that perspective.”

Judge Wilkinson’s basic critique is that the majority, like that in Roe, used an ambiguous text to impose its policy preference on the nation, at great cost to the democratic process and to local values. He assumed, as most experts do, that the decision would apply to the states.

“In both Roe and Heller,” Judge Wilkinson wrote, “the court claimed to find in the Constitution the authority to overrule the wishes of the people’s representatives. In both cases, the constitutional text did not clearly mandate the result, and the court had discretion to decide the case either way.”

Judge Posner built on themes in his recent book “How Judges Think,” which argued that constitutional adjudication by the Supreme Court is largely and necessarily political. The Heller decision, he wrote in The New Republic, “is evidence that the Supreme Court, in deciding constitutional cases, exercises a freewheeling discretion strongly flavored with ideology.”

Indeed, Judge Wilkinson wrote, “Some observers may be tempted to view Heller as a revenge of sorts for Roe” or “a sort of judicial tit-for-tat.” As Judge Posner put it, “The idea behind the decision” in Heller “may simply be that turnabout is fair play.”

Mr. Levy, who helped win Heller, said some conservatives wanted almost all decisions to be made by the political branches rather than the courts.

“But these are constitutional rights,” Mr. Levy, now chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group, said of the rights protected by the Second Amendment. “They are not rights consigned to the legislature.”

The analogy to Roe, he went on, is misguided. There is no reference to abortion in the Constitution.

The Second Amendment, by contrast, indisputably protects a right to keep and bear arms, though there is sharp disagreement about the scope of the right. Mr. Levy said the natural reading of the amendment, one supported by historical materials, was that it protected an individual right.

In his article, Judge Wilkinson wrote that he “readily agreed” that Roe “involved the more brazen assertion of judicial authority.” But he added that the Roe and Heller cases shared a number of common flaws, including “a failure to respect legislative judgments,” “a rejection of the principles of federalism” and “a willingness to embark on a complex endeavor that will require fine-tuning over many years of litigation.”

Judge Wilkinson saved particular scorn for a brief passage in Justice Scalia’s opinion that seemed to endorse a variety of restrictions on gun ownership. “Nothing in our opinion,” Justice Scalia wrote, “should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

Whatever else may be said about the Second Amendment, Judge Wilkinson wrote, those presumptions have no basis in the Constitution. “The Constitution’s text,” he wrote, “has as little to say about restrictions on firearm ownership by felons as it does about the trimesters of pregnancy.”

Mr. Levy, too, said he was not a fan of the passage. “I would have preferred that that not have been there,” he said. “It created more confusion than light.”

It is too soon to say much about the legacy of Heller. But Judge Wilkinson said that Heller, at a minimum, represented “the worst of missed opportunities — the chance to ground conservative jurisprudence in enduring and consistent principles of restraint.” At worst, he warned, “There is now a real risk that the Second Amendment will damage conservative judicial philosophy” as much as Roe “damaged its liberal counterpart.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 23, 2008 An article on Tuesday about conservative criticism of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on the application of the Second Amendment to gun control in the District of Columbia omitted two words from a passage in the decision concerning gun regulations that remained presumptively lawful. “Nothing in our opinion,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority, “should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” The words “felons and” were omitted.

Obama's Campaign Would Have Been the Envy of Nixon, Maybe Even Gordon Liddy

2008-10-08T17:00:00.000-07:00

JFK had a spirited contest with his Republican opponent Richard Nixon in 1960, and even his own son John Jr. joked about the voter fraud in Chicago that helped turn the tide in JFK's favor. But it's safe to say JFK and his brother Bobby would have been aghast at the spectacle of Democratic law enforcement and prosecutors marshalling the coercive powers of the state against political speech by his opponents.

Obama has been silent as his organization has put together a law enforcement campaign against his adversaries that would have made Nixon envious.

There is much that the disgraced Republican would have been still more envious of: the mainstream media's silent complicity and abstention from any serious investigation of the Obama organization's campaign against dissent, the internal discipline within the Obama campaign - no "John Dean" ratting Obama out, no "Deep Throat" informing investigative reporters (who in any case haven't the least inclination to discredit Obama), no "Alexander Haig" recruiting coup d'etat participants. And externally, Obama faces no "John Sirica" or "Sam Ervin" figure. Truly, Obama is blessed.

This WorldNetDaily article describes some of the intimidation the
Obama campaign is bringing to bear in Missouri and Pennsylvania, important
battleground states in the upcoming election.

Prosecutors for Obama hunting for 'lying ads'
'Truth Squad' using sheriffs, DAs to police bias against candidate
WorldNetDaily

A team of Obama-supporting prosecutors and sheriffs in Missouri is preparing to pursue legal challenges to any presidential campaign ads deemed to be false or misleading.

KMOV-TV in St. Louis reports District Attorney Robert McCulloch, a past president of the National District Attorneys Association, said that whether the ads could be attributed to an opponent's campaign itself, or another organization, "If they're not going to tell the truth, somebody's got to step up and say, 'That's not the truth. This is the truth.' "

The effort appeared to be part of a move by the Obama campaign to block advertisements to which it objects. The campaign also sent "threatening" letters to several news agencies in Pennsylvania and Ohio demanding they stop airing ads exposing Obama's gun stance, according to the National Rifle Association.

The NRA's Political Victory Fund condemned the attempt at censorship.

"Barack Obama and his campaign are terrified of the truth," said Chris W. Cox, chairman of organization. "Sen. Obama's statements and support for restricting access to firearms, raising taxes on guns and ammunition and voting against the use of firearms for self-defense in the home are a matter of public record. NRA-PVF will make sure that everyone knows of Obama's abysmal record on guns and hunting."

The Obama campaign declined to respond to a WND request for comment.

The NRA said Obama sent "cease and desist letters" to news outlets in the two states, "denouncing the ads and demanding their removal from the airwaves."

"Barack Obama would be the most anti-gun president in our nation's history. That's the truth," said Cox." NRA-PVF has the facts on our side. No amount of running from or lying about his record and then intimidating news outlets in the hope of deceiving American gun owners and hunters is going to work. Those strong arm tactics may work in Chicago, but not in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and not as long as NRA-PVF has anything to say about it."

The warnings were from Obama lawyer Robert Bauer, who told station managers that in order to stay in the Federal Communication Commission's good graces, they should not air the ads.

Josh Marquis, an Oregon prosecutor who serves as a spokesman for the NDAA, said the comments from Missouri don't sound like the McCulloch he knows.

"I'm really surprised. I know Bob," Marquis told WND.

The KMOV report said the Obama campaign asked members of Missouri's law enforcement to target anyone who "lies" or issues misleading television ads. Formation of the Obama "Truth Squad" was the result, the report said.

McCulloch declined to return a call from WND seeking comment.

The KMOV report said the campaign was being conducted by McCulloch and another prosecutor, Jennifer Joyce, along with a number of sheriffs throughout the state.

"They will be reminding voters that Barack Obama is a Christian who wants to cut taxes for anyone who makes less than $250,000 a year. They also say they plan to respond immediately to any ads and statements that violate Missouri's ethics laws," the report said.

"We want to keep this campaign focused on issues," Joyce told the station. "We don't want people to get distracted. Missourians don't want to be distracted by the divisive character attacks."

The campaign was assembled to "set the record straight," they said.

Officials with the Missouri Sheriff's Association declined to talk about any sheriffs who might be involved in the campaign.

At the blog Gateway Pundit, the reaction was immediate.

"St. Louis and Missouri Democrat sheriffs and top prosecutors are planning to go after anyone who makes false statements against Obama during his campaign. This is so one sided I can't even being to describe how wrong this agenda is," writes blogger Jim Hoft.

Hoft said Joyce and McCulloch "are threatening to bring libel charges against those who speak out falsely against Barack Obama."

Missouri blogger Doctor Bulldog commented: "Don't think they will stop with just the local radio and television stations. Oh, no. We bloggers are next on the chopping block. It doesn't matter if it is the truth. It only matters if Obama deems it a lie (i.e. – something that can cause damage to his bid to be president). Basically, no one is free to criticize Obama here in Missouri."

In the St. Louis Examiner, a commentary said, "Look, politicians are all about lies. It may be annoying (I find it entertaining), but that's for their opponents and good-government groups to counter – not law enforcement. … Even if the officeholders joining the 'truth squad' are nominally stepping out of their official roles in order to put on their (political) party hats and play politics, it's inappropriate. They wield too much power to use it to wag their fingers at people who say un-nice things about political hopefuls. Prosecutors and sheriffs are, after all, normally thought of as people with the clout to put their targets behind bars."

Marquis told WND politicians keep their right to have a political opinion and express it, but the DA's organization strives hard not to be partisan.

Savoir Faire and Connections Trumped Harvard Scholarship, Integrity

2008-09-27T18:49:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama and J.F.K. both wrote two best-selling books. Kennedy's authorship of Why England Slept and Profiles in Courage has been disparaged even by admirers like journalist Richard Reeves, who told Brian Lamb on C-Span's Booknotes program:

Both of Kennedy's books were knockoffs of Winston Churchill books. There is a
certain controversy: Did he write his own books? Well, he probably did, but they
were written first by Winston Churchill, the same books, where Winston Churchill
did a book on British political leadership at the turn of the century which was
exactly the same as Profiles in Courage. Some of the sentences were exactly
the same. Why England Slept, which was Kennedy's college thesis, was taken from
and often repeated Winston Churchill's book While England Slept.

It appears that Kennedy couldn't even be bothered to filch material from Churchill unassisted. A Wikipedia article reports that Georgetown professor "Jules Davids 'materially assisted in the preparation of several chapters' according to the [Profiles in Courage] Foreword, but extensive revelations from many sources, including a detailed account by Jules Davids himself, establish that Davids prepared initial drafts of five of the chapters on the book that then won Kennedy a Pulitzer Prize."

There is no corresponding dispute as to Obama's authorship of his two best-selling autobiographies, Dreams From My Father or The Audacity of Hope.

However, his Harvard academic bona fides are highly suspect. In this article, California conservative writer Jack Cashill turns a critical eye toward Obama's Harvard Law credential.

Why Obama is mum about Harvard
The reason Barack, Michelle don't talk about editor post
By Jack Cashill

On the surface, at least, Barack Obama's single most impressive accomplishment has been his 1990 election to the presidency of the Harvard Law Review. This position also provided Obama his only real executive experience as he supervised the law review's staff of 80 editors.

One has to wonder, then, why neither he nor wife Michelle emphasized this singular honor during the up-by-the-bootstraps biographical sections of their respective speeches in Denver. In fact, neither of them so much as mentioned Obama's time at Harvard, this despite his vulnerability on the executive experience charge.

Their silence likely derives from one verifiable fact: Obama's record at Harvard was no more authentic than John Kerry's record inVietnam. Obama seems to have learned from Kerry.

In the age of the Internet, the less said about a dubious credential the better, and Obama's law presidency credential is dubious on any number of levels.

For starters, Obama did not do nearly well enough at his previous stop, Columbia University, to justify admission to Harvard Law. According to the New York Sun, university spokesman Brian Connolly confirmed that Obama graduated in 1983 with a major in political science, but without honors. In the age of affirmative action and grade inflation, a minority in a relatively easy major like political science had to under-perform dramatically to avoid minimal honors.

Obama apparently did just that. The specifics we may never know. As the New York Times concedes, Obama "declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years."

Would that Bristol Palin could get off so easily!

There are any number of possible reasons for Obama's reticence about Columbia : his grades, the courses he took, his writing samples and, of course, his associations.

At that time, for instance, both Bill Ayers and Obama fell within the orbit of left-wing Columbia superstar Edward Said. Just recently out of hiding, Ayers was attending the Bank Street College of Education, which adjoins the Columbia campus.

Five years after leaving Columbia , Obama decided on law school. His lack of resources did not deter him from thinking big. Nor did his B-minus effort at his Hawaii prep school or his equally indifferent grades at Columbia. As Obama relates in "Dreams From My Father," he limited his choices to only three law schools - "Harvard, Yale, Stanford." (It must be nice to be Obama.) He does not mention his connections.

Harvard Law School is notoriously difficult to get into. Annually, some 7,000 applications apply for some 500 seats. Applicant LSAT scores generally chart in the 98 to 99 percentile range, and GPAs average between 3.80 and 3.95. If Obama's LSAT scores merited admission, we would know about them. We don't. The Obama camp guards those scores, like his SAT scores, more tightly that Iran does its nuclear secrets.

We know enough about Obama's Columbia grades to know how far they fall below the Harvard norm, likely even below the affirmative action-adjusted black norm at Harvard. As far back as 1988, however, Obama had serious pull. He would need it.

As previously reported, Khalid al-Mansour, principle adviser to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, lobbied friends like Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton to intervene at Harvard on Obama's behalf. An orthodox Muslim, al-Mansour has not met the crackpot anti-Semitic theory he could not embrace. As for bin Talal, in October 2001, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani sent his $10 million relief check back un-cashed after the Saudi billionaire blamed 9/11 on America.

These are not connections that Obama would like to see broadcast, which further explains his shyness about the Harvard experience.

There is more. Obama did not make the Harvard Law Review (HLR) the old-fashioned way, the way HLR's first black editor, Charles Houston, did 70 years prior. To Obama's good fortune, the HLR had replaced a meritocracy in which editors were elected based on grades - the president being the student with the highest academic rank - with one in which half the editors were chosen through a writing competition.

This competition, the New York Times reported in 1990, was "meant to help insure that minority students became editors of The Law Review." It did just that. At the end of his first year, Obama was named, along with 40 or so of his classmates, an editor of the HLR.

Unlike most editors, and likely all its presidents, Obama was not a writer. During his tenure at Harvard, he wrote only one heavily edited, unsigned note. In this note for the third volume of the 1990 HLR, he argued against any limits on abortion, citing the government's interest in "preventing increasing numbers of children from being born in to lives of pain and despair."

Obama's timing, however, was better than his writing. In the same spring 1990 term that he would stand for the presidency of the HLR, the Harvard Law School found itself embroiled in an explosive racial brouhaha. Black firebrand law professor Derrick Bell was demanding that the Harvard Law School appoint a black woman to the law faculty. This protest would culminate in vigils and protests by the racially sensitive student body, in the course of which Obama would compare the increasingly absurd Bell to Rosa Parks.

Feeling the pressure, HLR editors wanted to elect their first African-American president. Obama had an advantage. Spared the legacy of slavery and segregation, and having grown up in a white household, he lacked the hard edge of many of his black colleagues.

"Obama cast himself as an eager listener," the New York Times reported, "sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once." In February 1990, after an ideologically charged all-day affair, Obama's fellow editors elected him president from among 19 candidates. As it happened, Obama prevailed only after the HLR's small conservative faction threw him its support.

Curiously, once elected, Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time."

One more thing: The 1990 Times article about Obama's election notes that the president of the HLR usually goes on to serve as a clerk for a Supreme Court justice. Not the Mansourian Candidate. Here, oddly, his ambition deserted him. He told the Times that he planned "to spend two or three years in private law practice and then return to Chicago to re-enter community work, either in politics or in local organizing." In this unlikely surrender to Chicago politics, the realist sees insecurity at best and, at worst, the quid for al-Mansour's quo.

Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue.

Barack Obama's Flip-Flops Make John Kerry Look Resolute by Comparison

2008-06-28T12:51:00.000-07:00

JFK was known to waffle and flip-flop, most notably at the Bay of Pigs when he promised then withheld air support from Cuban exiles who mounted a 1961 attack on Castro's forces in southwest Cuba. But his word was generally his bond. He certainly never approached Barack Obama's remarkable streak of policy changes and "clarifications."

A February 25 Washington Post article outlined five Obama flip-flops that have already been eclipsed by mightier and more recent tergiversations.

The five listed by the Post were:

1. Campaign contributions from unions. In January, the Obama campaign described union contributions to the Edwards and Clinton campaigns as "special interest" money. Then as unions began to endorse him, he began referring to them as representatives of "working people" whose support he was "thrilled" to receive.

2. Public financing of campaigns. Just this past September, Obama said he would agree to public financing of the 2008 presidential election if the GOP nominee does likewise. By February, it was clear that Obama's fundraising juggernaut would outperform any Republican counterpart by multiples.

His spokesman weaseled that Obama had never actually committed to public financing. (Shades of "no controlling legal authority.") Obama himself added several new conditions before he would honor his agreement to submit to public financing, including the impossible demand for regulation of outside groups. Recently he reneged altogether, rationalizing that the system of public financing of elections is "broken."

It was transparently self-serving and, I would argue, excusable in terms of sheer self-interest. But true to form, Obama admitted no fault and instead used the announcement as an occasion to accuse Republicans prospectively of (future) attack ads. The best defense is a good offense.

3. The Cuba embargo. In remarks at Southern Illinois University in 2004, he said it was time "to end the embargo with Cuba" because it had "utterly failed in the attempt to overthrow Castro." But in August 2007, speaking this time to a Cuban-American group in vote-rich Miami, he said he would not "take off the embargo" because it is "an important inducement for change."

Since then, he has revised his position again, to permit unrestricted travel to Cuba, and to allow a free flow of financial remittances from Cubans in the U.S. back to Cuba.

4. Illegal immigration. In a March 2004 questionnaire, Obama reported that he would "oppose" government efforts to "crack down on businesses that hire illegal immigrants." But under working class pressure from the Edwards and Clinton constituencies this past January, he said in a televised debate that "we do have to crack down on those employers that are taking advantage of the situation."

5. Legalizing marijuana. While running for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama told college students that he supported eliminating criminal penalties for marijuana use. In an October presidential debate, he joined other Democratic candidates in opposing the decriminalization of marijuana.

As the Washington Times wryly commented a month before the Post ran its piece, " Barack Obama, the senatorial candidate of 2004, might have a bone to pick with Barack Obama, the presidential candidate of 2008."

Intellectually, Bringing a Knife to a Gun Fight

The Washington Post article was in no way exhaustive, as Obama has reversed himself on a number of issues, including health care for illegal immigrants, Jeremiah Wright, and the severity of the geo-political threats posed by Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.

" I mean, think about it," he coaxed an adoring crowd in Oregon last month.

"Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us, you know, Iran, they spend one one-hundredth of what we spend on the military. If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn't stand a chance."

Conservative critics began to get traction that Obama is a lightweight in foreign policy and geopolitics, out of his depth and a menace to the troops he would command and the economy he would shepherd. Just one day after his gaffe, he "clarified" in Montana.

"Iran is a grave threat. It has an illicit nuclear program. It supports terrorism across the region and militias in Iraq. It threatens Israel's existence. It denies the Holocaust...." Alrighty, then.

"When is Iran a threat to the US and when is it not? As far as Barack Obama is concerned," quipped British blogger Alex Spillius, "the answer can vary within 24 hours."

Second term of Jimmy Carter?

"From the beginning, Barack Obama's special appeal was his vow to remain an idealistic outsider, courageous and optimistic, and never to shift his positions for political expediency, or become a captive of the Inside-the-Beltway intelligentsia, or kiss up to special interests and big money donors," wrote Margaret Talev of McClatchy's Washington bureau Thursday.

"In recent weeks, though, Obama has done all those things.

"He abandoned public campaign financing after years of championing it. Backed a compromise on wiretap legislation that gives telecom companies retroactive immunity for helping the government conduct spying without warrants. Dumped his controversial pastor of two decades — then his church — after saying he could no more abandon the pastor than abandon his own grandmother.

"He said he wouldn't wear the U.S. flag pin because it had become a substitute for true patriotism, then started wearing it. Ramped up his courtship of unions. Shifted from a pledge to protect working-class families from tax increases to a far more expensive promise not to raise taxes on families that earn up to $250,000 a year. Turned to longtime D.C. Democratic wise men to run his vice-presidential search and staff his foreign-policy brain trust.

"Presidential candidates often tack toward the center after securing their party's nominations. But all this tactical repositioning by Obama suggests that he's a more complex, pragmatic and arguably more opportunistic politician than the fresh face of "change we can believe in" that he presented during the primary season."

Obama is not the only revisionist in the campaign. Presumptive G.O.P. nominee John McCain has changed his positions on tax cuts, amnesty for illegal immigrants and offshore oil drilling. But Obama's pretension as a uniquely principled man of granitic integrity, a man who transcends the squalid politics of mere mortals, imparts a fragrance of hypocrisy to his agile pragmatism.

Yet Obama's support is sturdy, not issue-based. This is because so many of his followers are otherwise apolitical, and fairly contemptuous of conventional civic engagement. They are more enamored with the idea of Obama than with the actual man standing before them. He is a battle shield against the accountability and moralism of the Christian Right.

"My support is still strong," said Obama supporter David Christie, 20, in Talev's piece. "And I don't think folks my age will turn on him if he keeps doing things like that. Folks my age are excited, and that's not going to die because of a couple of decisions."

And for battle-hardened Democratic foot-soldiers, hungry after eight years out of office, hypocrisy and duplicity are a small price to pay for a return to happy days of free-flowing patronage.

"Rejecting public financing does seem kind of cynical," said Democratic legislator Ellen Nielsen of New Hampshire, "but for someone who wants to be president, if you aspire to that job I guess you have to do it. I don't expect him to be a moral paragon. You don't get to where he is if you are."

Obama Inoculates Against His Choice Not to Serve

2008-05-26T13:20:00.000-07:00

Today, Obama and his confederates in the mass media are busily at work trying to refocus voters' attention from the fact that, although he is a healthy, strapping physical specimen, Obama has never served five minutes in the military. National Guardsmen Dan Quayle and George W. Bush are grizzled warriors by comparison. When it comes to military bona fides, Obama takes his place with the much-deferred Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and college cheerleader Trent Lott.

This presents some difficulties on Memorial Day weekend, as he attempts to hold his own against Republican candidate John McCain, Vietnam War hero, prisoner of war and U.S.S. Forrestal survivor. But Obama has made the best of a bad situation, putting McCain on the defensive for voting against a liberalized G.I. Bill that would have reduced military retention rates by an estimated 18 percent during a manpower crisis in the voluntary force in time of war. Adult supervision often presents a fat, immobile target.

Obama also appealed to military veterans and pro-military voters by promising that he will have a policy of "zero tolerance" for homelessness among veterans. Oh, really? Is he going to prohibit mental illness? Is he going to immunize veterans against all criminal prosecution? Maybe Montel's RV will be stocking Obama's magic "change" pill to prevent all drug abuse and alcoholism among veterans?

I wonder if Obama realizes how many veterans there are in this country? He's making promises to an awful lot of people. There probably weren't a whole lot of veterans going into "community organizing" back in Chicago, so we ought to forgive him if he has miscalculated.

JFK didn't need to out-promise his opponent, partly because his own World War II resume was so strong. He was the hero of PT 109, and suffered a back injury in action against the Japanese that pained him for the rest of his life. His opponent Richard Nixon was, like JFK, a WWII Navy veteran of the Pacific theater. The poker-playing supply officer Nixon had, admittedly, been more of a Sergeant Bilko figure than combat hero. But he and Kennedy shared the same basic worldview.

Obama has no such luxury. The contest between Obama and his opponent is often the difference between two starkly contrasting worldviews. McCain and his constituency self-identify as citizens of a grand and exceptional nation whereas early Obama supporters, upon honest reflection, would more likely identify themselves as citizens of the world. Now Obama must broaden his base. He must reach out to the people largely despised by his core supporters - he must appeal to voters who feel blessed, not embarrassed, to be American.

The pattern for Obama is that wherever he is weak, he promises more extravagantly. He knows next to nothing about international diplomacy and geo-political strategy; he promises a new era of friendship and world peace. He is clueless about economics; he promises to halt outsourcing, excessive corporate profits and capital flight, and to restore good manufacturing jobs. On health issues, he is slightly better informed, and his positions are accordingly more nuanced, more responsible than Hillary Clinton's.

This would seem to suggest that we have picked Obama before he was ripe. He may be a wise statesman twenty years from now, but we are locking him into snap judgments that we demand of him while he is yet very green, and it's going to be an ugly scene next year or the next when his various parasitical constituencies demand that he make good on his absurd promises. He will either have to break his promises, or dispossess innocent bystanders to satisfy his stalwart supporters and enforcers.

If he chooses the latter course, he will eventually learn the lessons of Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe: you can kill the goose that lays the golden egg, but you can only kill it once.

Humor in the Democratic Primaries

2008-05-03T14:24:00.000-07:00

J.F.K. distinguished himself in part by his wit, but in the (pre-Vietnam) 1960 election the mass media were still somewhat deferential, or at least courteous, to political leaders on the national stage. There was no Laugh-In, no Rich Little, no Chevy Chase, no Saturday Night Live yet. And so J.F.K. could dish out the humor, but wasn't generally an object of parody or derision.

Times have changed. Despite the Liberal U.S. news media's obvious favor, Barack Obama has nevertheless been satirized and parodied to an extent J.F.K. could never have imagined.

The news media abstained from any serious scrutiny of Obama until the cumulative primary election results were irreversible, but all good things must come to an end, and when Saturday Night Live broke ranks to parody its own (NBC) newsman Tim Russert, much of the news herd shifted to more even-handed treatment of Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Neither would J.F.K. have recognized the cottage industry in humor driven by the news cycle, including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Obama figured prominently in the Daily Show's April 14 "Gaffe-In" feature after his condescending comments about embittered, xenophobic blue-collar Pennsylvanians "clinging" to their (Christian) faith and their guns due to unkept political promises. http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=166074&title=headlines-gaffe-in

The most absurd and stinging parodies nowadays come from the blogosphere. Perhaps the zaniest is Red State Update, presented by two exaggerated "good ole boys" from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on YouTube.com. Here is their parody of former presidential candidate Bill Richardson's endorsement of Obama, accomplished by overdubbing an actual joint interview. It is absurd, more than a little offensive, and side-splittingly hilarious. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsvJyJsoBLY

Columnist Says Rezko Protege Obama Helped Cause Chicago Subprime Crisis

2008-04-08T14:58:00.000-07:00

JFK was economically sophisticated, as befits an Ivy League-educated heir to the enormous Kennedy fortune. In some ways, he was Ronald Reagan's economic policy precursor, boldly slashing taxes to stimulate the economy and, counter-intuitively, increase government revenues.

But Barack Obama's economic policies - despite his own biography of privilege and prosperity - focus on class envy and poverty rather than the creation, much less the conservation, of wealth.

The Community Reinvestment Act, passed in reaction to racially bounded "redlining," legally empowered community organizers like Obama to pressure banks into extending loans, against their better judgment, to subprime borrowers.

According to Jerry Bowyer, Obama and his comrades are responsible for much of the vast increase in subprime portfolios that now threatens to bring the U.S. economy down. Here, Bowyer brings his accusation against economically clueless community activists and demagogues who insisted on egalitarian loan policies as if there would be no day of reckoning.

How "Community Organizers" (Like Obama) Created the Subprime Crisis

by Jerry Bowyer
TownHall.com

I wrote to you previously (Meet Barry Obama, 'Fair Housing' Lawyer) about the Community Reinvestment Act, a law which compels banks to make home loans in minority neighborhoods to people who were poor credit risks.

Although the CRA is well known in the financial industry, political pundits and reporters often know very little about finance and so have missed this extremely important aspect of the story. Ignorance of economics doesn't help much either. The political class seems blissfully unaware of the concept of unintended consequences which is the idea that laws which are designed to make our lives better often make our lives worse.

On a recent edition of Kudlow and Company, I debated Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders on precisely this point. He seemed not only to disagree with my point that if congress compels banks to make Subprime loans, then they share responsibility for the crisis that results when the borrowers default; he seemed not to understand it. For him once we identify the target group as bankers, nothing else matters - they're bad and he's good, no more reasoning is necessary.

It's not just Congress that's responsible. Yes, they forged the weapons, but some army needed to wield them. That's where guys like Barry Obama came in to the picture.

When Barry (who was gradually changing his name to Barack around this time) graduated from Columbia, he took a brief stint as a researcher writing for a corporate consulting firm. According to his memoirs he thought of himself as 'a spy' who was dropped 'behind enemy lines'.

Shortly thereafter, he left the enemy territory of corporate America and moved to a job about which he could feel proud - he went to work for the New York branch of the Public Interest Research Group.

PIRG is one of those left of center activist groups who, among other things, uses the legitimate concept of 'fair housing' to force banks into making bad loans. PIRG has actively lobbied for a stronger (yes, you guessed it) Community Reinvestment Act.

According to his bio, and accounts from friends, Obama became an expert in real estate law and fair housing while working as a community organizer and public interest lawyer. This is especially the case during his Chicago period.

After graduating from law school Barack worked for various community groups which were attempting to get black churches politically involved in left-of-center causes. He was hired because the Developing Communities Project, which was headed by two older Jewish gentlemen, was having trouble making headway in the black community. By then, the name change to Barack was complete and so was the shift to an Afro-centric identity. Barack was a natural.

He was able to play upon crowds' sense of racial identity, castigating black audiences for their failure to embrace the right policies, but offering hope to them in the form of his own leadership. He joined a prominent Afro-centric church at this time, headed by Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Eventually Barack joined the civil rights law firm, Miner, Ballard and Galland, where he specialized in fair housing. That's where he did work for the (now indicted) Syrian-born entrepreneur Tony Rezko.

Rezko was a very powerful and politically connected urban real estate developer who did quite a lot of business with the government. Rezko helped Barack go from public interest lawyer to State Senator. And Rezko didn't just help Barack into the upper legislative house, he helped him into his family house as well.

One wonders to what degree Rezko was helped by low-income-sub-prime-lending-fair-housing-industrial complex of urban Chicago. For all the details we may need to wait for the Rezko trial.

One thing, however, is perfectly clear already. Obama spent his pre-elected career working right in the middle of the complex of law firms and activist groups which use law and regulations to push banks into vastly increasing their lending to Subprime borrowers right in the middle of the golden age of the expansion of the Subprime industry.

Like JFK, Obama Lacks Spine to Repudiate Racists Whose Support He Needs

2008-03-29T11:30:00.000-07:00

JFK made nice speeches about civil rights, but knew that he needed the support of racist Southern Democrats in the U.S. Senate, so he was relatively inert during the turmoil of the Civil Rights movement.

He also understood that Blacks were inalienably Democratic, and therefore would remain in his column despite his flirtations with white racist demogogues like James Eastland, Orville Faubus, William Fulbright and Sam Ervin.

Likewise, Sen. Obama has generated some soaring rhetoric about unity and racial reconciliation, but he understands as a prosperous biracial man that his bona fides with the resentful Black underclass are not secure enough to permit him to repudiate Black racist demogogues and economic hypocrites like his Chicago pastor.

Just in case Obama wavers, ideological enforcers like the Washington Post's Colbert King are at the ready with columns like the one below.

Why Obama Stands With His Church
By Colbert King

All they wanted to do was pray with the rest of the congregation. But that was asking too much.

To be sure, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, two leaders in Philadelphia's black community, enjoyed great success in bringing African Americans into the Christian fold. But the steady growth in black membership at St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church distressed the white congregation that owned the church.

At first, black Christians were moved to seats along the wall. That still allowed for too much mingling. So one Sunday morning as Allen, Jones and the other black worshipers knelt to pray, white church elders tapped Jones and Allen on the shoulders and told them to take their praying upstairs to a recently built balcony.

Rather than submit to such humiliation, Jones, Allen and the rest of the black worshipers walked out. The two men formed their own congregations.

Jones gained permission from the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania to establish America's first black parish, St. Thomas African Episcopal Church. He eventually became the Episcopal Church's first African American priest.

Allen formed a Methodist congregation that eventually became today's multimillion-member African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.

The walkout in the City of Brotherly Love occurred in 1787 -- a year that marks the beginning of America's independent black church, a theological movement born out of racism.

This history comes to mind as I listen to conservative commentators, chief among them MSNBC's Pat Buchanan, brand as "racist" the slogan adopted by Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago: "Unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian."

Trinity is Barack Obama's church and the place where the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. -- a gift to all who would bring down Obama -- served as pastor until his recent retirement.

Buchanan and his ilk look at Trinity's slogan with horror. They label the church's theological values "Afro-centric" and "racially exclusive." Trinity is beyond the pale of Christianity, at least their version of it. Psst: Trinity has plenty of company, coast to coast.

Many black congregations, from storefronts to mega-churches, are in sync with the Trinity slogan. They, too, see no need to apologize for their African roots. Nor are they ashamed of preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

But hey, what's with this newfound concern about African Americans worshiping among themselves in their own way? More important, who forced that separation?

As sociologist Kenneth Clark noted in his book "Dark Ghetto," ministers and lay leaders of white Christian churches historically were unwilling to incorporate large numbers of blacks into their houses of Christ. That's still the case today with some churches.

Truth is, folks like Buchanan don't really care that America's Christian congregations don't look like salt and pepper on Sunday mornings. The reality of blacks and whites worshiping apart doesn't disturb them. If anything, Buchanan thinks African Americans are ingrates -- that we should be satisfied with our station in life.

"America has been the best country on earth for black folks," Buchanan wrote in his column, " PJB: A Brief for Whitey," posted on his Web site yesterday.

"It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known," he wrote.

Like JFK, Obama Leading "Double Life"

2008-03-18T09:47:00.000-07:00

JFK was a notorious adulterer who profaned the presidency with multiple trysts, and used the White House staff to prevent his wife from discovering women with him there. By contrast, Obama appears to be a faithful husband. Yet, as Thomas Sowell writes below, he "has been leading as much of a double life as Eliot Spitzer."

What Obama found irresistible, however, was not a mini-skirt or a bursting bodice, but the cult of Black racism and treason in Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. Now he is telling his spiritual mistress of 20 years not to call him at work, and not to embarrass him in front of his new friends. But it's hard not to notice the lipstick on his collar.

Race and Politics
By Thomas Sowell
March 18, 2008

There is something both poignant and galling about the candidacy of Barack Obama. Any American, regardless of party or race, has to find it heartening that the country has reached the point where a black candidate for President of the United States sweeps so many primaries in states where the overwhelming majority of the population is white.

We have all seen the crowds enthralled by Barack Obama's rhetoric and theatrical style. Many of his supporters put their money where their mouths were, so that this recently arrived Senator received more millions of dollars in donations than candidates who have been far more visible on the national stage for far more years.

That's the good news. The bad news is that Barack Obama has been leading as much of a double life as Eliot Spitzer.

While talking about bringing us together and deploring "divisive" actions, Senator Obama has for 20 years been a member of a church whose minister, Jeremiah Wright, has said that "God Bless America" should be replaced by "God damn America" -- among many other wild and even obscene denunciations of American society, including blanket racist attacks on whites.

Nor was this an isolated example. Fox News Channel has played tapes of various sermons of Jeremiah Wright, and says that it has tapes with hours of more of the same.

Wright's actions matched his words. He went with Louis Farrakhan to Libya and Farrakhan received an award from his church.

Sean Hannity began reporting on Jeremiah Wright back in April of 2007. But the mainstream media saw no evil, heard no evil and spoke no evil.

Now that the facts have come out in a number of places, and can no longer be suppressed, many in the media are trying to spin these facts out of existence.

Spin number one is that Jeremiah Wright's words were "taken out of context." Like most people who use this escape hatch, those who say this do not explain what the words mean when taken in context. In just what context does "God damn America" mean something different?

Spin number two is that Barack Obama says he didn't hear the particular things that Jeremiah Wright said that are now causing so much comment.

It wasn't just an isolated remark. Nor were the enthusiastic responses of the churchgoers something which suggests that this anti-American attitude was news to them or something that they didn't agree with. If Barack Obama was not in church that particular day, he belonged to that church for 20 years. He made a donation of more than $20,000 to that church. In all that time, he never had a clue as to what kind of man Jeremiah Wright was? Give me a break! You can't be with someone for 20 years, call him your mentor, and not know about his racist and anti-American views.

Neither Barack Obama nor his media spinmeisters can put this story behind him with some facile election year rhetoric. If Senator Obama wants to run with the rabbits and hunt with the hounds, then at least let the rabbits and the hounds know that.

The fact that Obama talks differently than Jeremiah Wright does not mean that his track record is different. Barack Obama's voting record in the Senate is perfectly consistent with the far left ideology and the grievance culture, just as his wife's statement that she was never proud of her country before is consistent with that ideology.

Senator Barack Obama's political success thus far has been a blow for equality. But equality has its down side. Equality means that a black demagogue who has been exposed as a phony deserves exactly the same treatment as a white demagogue who has been exposed as a phony.

We don't need a President of the United States who got to the White House by talking one way, voting a very different way in the Senate, and who for 20 years followed a man whose words and deeds contradict Obama's carefully crafted election year image.
--------
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

2008-03-17T23:00:00.000-07:00

JFK felt obliged to make a major speech during his 1960 presidential campaign when critics predicted that the Catholic Church would dominate the U.S. government under the Catholic Kennedy. He promised that no clergyman would influence his decisions in the White House, and most Americans found that convincing. As it turns out, there is some evidence that Francis Cardinal Spellman was unusually influential as to U.S. foreign policy, but this was no less true during the Eisenhower administration.

Obama has had the opposite errand until recently. Last year he was pledging his devotion to 20-year spiritual adviser Jeremiah Wright. This was in part to deflect accusations that he is a secret Muslim. Now he may wish he had identified himself as a Muslim, because his ties to Wright are proving controversial and embarrassing. Now Obama has to make a speech accounting for his devotion to a racist, divisive pastor and congregation.

If you missed the "Black Values" on Barack Obama's church's About Us page, it's too late.

The 160-word section has since been deleted from the About Us page, replaced by videotaped testimonials from church members vouching for Pastor Jeremiah Wright, including a white official from the parent denomination, United Church of Christ, who said she feels welcome at predominantly black Trinity.

“These black ethics must be taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever blacks are gathered,” the original page said. But it was taken down, and Wright has gone into seclusion, unavailable for comment.

Obama is expected to deliver a speech today to clarify his views on the racially inflammatory, anti-American sermons that Wright has delivered at Trinity United Church of Christ during the two decades Obama has been a member.

JFK had Spellman; Obama has Wright

2008-03-13T20:37:00.000-07:00

Like Barack Obama, JFK was close to a churchman, Cardinal Francis Spellman. Spellman was alleged to have been complicit in the coup against South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, himself a Catholic, which led to Diem's assassination by Buddhist forces.

Spellman was a fierce anti-Communist who was very influential in U.S. foreign policy, and was occasionally dispatched by the Vatican to represent Catholic interests with national leaders, including Eisenhower and Kennedy.

Obama, too, has close ties to a churchman with foreign policy interests and strong opinions about the illegitimacy of American society. Obama's confidante, United Church of Christ preacher Jeremiah A. Wright, laid out his view of America in a YouTube sermon described below by Newsmax.com correspondent Ronald Kessler.

Obama Minister's Hatred of America
By Ronald Kessler

In a sermon delivered at Howard University, Barack Obama’s longtime minister, friend, and adviser blamed America for starting the AIDS virus, training professional killers, importing drugs, and creating a racist society that would never elect a black man as president. The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., pastor of Obama’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, gave the sermon at the school’s Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel in Washington on Jan. 15, 2006.

While snippets from the sermon have appeared in a few magazines, no news outlet has previously run the entire text of Wright’s diatribe. An audio recording of the sermon appears on YouTube.

Raising his voice in rage, Wright began his sermon by saying, “Fact No. 1: We’ve got more black men in prison than there are in college. Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body.”

Omitting fact No. 2, Wright thundered on: “Fact No. 3: America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. We invaded Grenada for no other reason than to get Maurice Bishop [a Grenada revolutionary who seized power in 1979], invaded Panama because Noriega would not dance to our tune any more. We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers. We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Qaddafi.”

Wright continued: “Fact No. 4: We put [Nelson] Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.

Fact No. 5: We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-semitic.”

His voice rising, Wright was on a roll: “Fact No. 6: We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. They’re just finding out about that. We care nothing about human life if the ends justifies the means.

Fact No. 7: We do not care if poor black and brown children cannot read and kill each other senselessly. We abandoned the cities back in the '60s when the riots started and it really doesn’t matter what those nations do to each other; we gave up on them and public education of poor people who live in the projects . . .”

Wright went on: “Fact No. 8: We started the AIDS virus, and now that it is out of control, we still put more money in the military than in medicine; more money in hate than in humanitarian concerns. Everybody does not have access to healthcare, I don’t care what the rich white boys in the Senate say. Listen up: If you are poor, black and elderly, forget it.”

Concluding, Wright said: “Fact No. 9: We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty.

And fact No. 10: We are selfish, self-centered egotists who are arrogant and ignorant and betray our church and do not try to make the kingdom that Jesus talked about a reality. And — and — and in light of these 10 facts, God has got to be sick of this s***.”

Meeting with Jewish leaders in Cleveland on Feb. 24, Obama described Wright as being like “an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I don't agree with.” He rarely mentions the items of disagreement.

Obama went on to explain away Wright’s anti-Zionist statements as being rooted in his anger over the Jewish state’s support for South Africa under its previous policy of apartheid. As with a previous claim that his church gave an award to Louis Farrakhan because of his work with ex-offenders, Obama made that up out of thin air. Wright’s statements denouncing Israel have not been qualified in any way.

As for Wright’s repeated comments blaming America for the 9/11 attacks, Obama has said it sounds as if the minister was trying to be “provocative.” Hearing Wright’s venomous and paranoid denunciations of this country, the vast majority of Americans would walk out. Instead, Obama and his wife Michelle have presumably sat through hundreds of similar sermons. Indeed, Obama has described Wright as his “sounding board” during the two decades he has known him.

Obama has said he found religion through Wright in the 1980s and consulted him before deciding to run for president. He prayed privately with Wright before announcing his candidacy last year. Aside from showing poor judgment, it’s difficult to imagine that Obama could be so close to Wright without agreeing with at least some of his views.

In light of Wright’s perspective, Michelle Obama’s comment that she feels proud of America for the first time makes perfect sense. (In a second iteration, she said she feels “really proud” for the first time.)

Wright’s blame-America mentality also fits in neatly with many on the left who support Obama’s weak approach to national security and dealing with foreign dictators. To date, the Obama-loving media have largely ignored the senator’s close association with Wright. The question is whether the blackout will be lifted before voters decide whether they want to entrust Obama with America’s future.

Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com.

Somali Tribesmen Assert Jurisdiction Over Obama's Female Rival, Demand U.S. Apology

2008-03-01T11:20:00.000-08:00

John F. Kennedy had a devoted following in his family's ancestral homeland, but Ireland generally stayed out of U.S. elections, and there was no Irish concept of dhimmi. Barack Obama's ethnic Somali kinsmen in Kenya are decidedly less deferential toward U.S. sovereignty, and have intiated a trial of Obama's American rival Hillary Clinton in absentia for campaign tactics they have declared unacceptable.

Pro-Obama Somali immigrant activists in Minneapolis, also, have demanded an apology for the release of a photograph that shows the Illinois Senator wearing a Somali turban and tribal robes during a visit to his father's homeland in western Kenya.

In 1993, Somali Muslims massacred several U.S. soldiers who were part of a U.N. peacekeeping mission to Mogadishu, then mutilated them, displayed them to gawkers, and drug their bodies through the streets to the merriment of Somali onlookers.

The Obama photograph presents an unforgettable image of a potential U.S. Commander-in-Chief dressing himself in the robes and turban of an ethnic group whose response to the mutilation of idealistic young American soldiers was joy and celebration.

The ceremonial photo does not predate the "Blackhawk Down" tragedy, and therefore Obama's worldview can legitimately be analyzed in the context of Mogadishu. One wonders what Obama was thinking when he let these people dress him up and photograph him like that, and it is impossible to imagine J.F.K. committing any analogous gaffe.

You have to wonder what Obama will let other foreigners do to and in the United States, as long as they express personal admiration for him.

Clinton faces Kenya cattle fine over Obama photo
By Daniel Wallis

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenyan elders may impose a fine on U.S. presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, payable in livestock, after a photo of her rival Barack Obama in robes dragged their people into the race for the White House.

The picture, which appeared on a U.S. Web site, showed the Illinois senator in a white headdress and traditional Somali attire during a 2006 visit to Wajir in Kenya's remote northeast.

Obama has battled a whispering campaign by fringe elements who wrongly say he is Muslim and his aides accused Clinton's campaign of "the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering" after the photograph was published.

Wajir elders resolved to file an official complaint with the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, dropping earlier plans to hold a protest after Friday prayers.

They said they would also convene a traditional Somali court to investigate the matter. It can impose fines that are payable in cattle, goats or camels.

"We will go ahead with this case whether Senator Clinton or Democratic party leaders turn up or not," said Mohamed Ibrahim, a member of the clan that hosted Obama during his trip. "But this whole thing can be avoided if only an apology is made."

The late father of the Democratic frontrunner was from western Kenya. Many in the east African country support Obama the way the Irish idolized President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s -- as one of their own who succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

"The clan he was with have every right to be offended," said Hussein Ali, a 32-year-old unemployed man outside the main Jamia Mosque in the capital Nairobi.

"Obama's enemies are trying to portray him as a terrorist, saying all Muslims, and especially Somalis, are dangerous men."

MOLLIFYING (OBAMA'S KINSMEN)

Clinton's campaign denies authorizing the release of the controversial photo but says that, with 700 staffers, it could not be certain someone had not sent it out unofficially.

That has not mollified locals in Wajir, a small desert town near the Somali border, who demanded Clinton "clear her name".

Other Kenyans questioned the timing of the picture's publication, days before make-or-break votes in Ohio and Texas next week.

For many Americans, Somalia conjures up disturbing images of dead U.S. troops being dragged through Mogadishu's dusty streets during the "Black Hawk Down" battle of 1993.

The U.S. military launched air strikes on the Horn of Africa country last year in its hunt for al Qaeda, including suspects wanted over the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in 1988.

"We suspect the intent behind releasing this picture now, just before Tuesday's very critical vote," said Omar Jamal, head of the St Paul, Minnesota-based Somali Justice Advocacy Center.

His lobby group, which works with Somali immigrants in the United States, has also demanded an apology from Clinton's camp.

"They are trying to make a link between a man who could be the next U.S. president and a country with al Qaeda terrorist activities. They're trying to tell citizens, look who you might be voting for," he told Reuters by telephone.

"Everyone is very upset. It's outrageous and undermining."

Why Are Barack & Michelle Obama Devoted to a Racist, Divisive, Anti-American Church?

2008-02-27T19:03:00.000-08:00

John F. Kennedy was a lifelong, if nominal, member of the Catholic Church, which is not associated with any particular ethnic group, and indeed may consist of every race and ethnicity on the planet.

Barak H. Obama, by contrast, is a member of a highly ethnocentric sect so preoccupied with African racial identity that it lauds non-Christian afrocentric allies like Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan in its official publications.

Like Erik Rush, I have waited in vain for Sen. Obama to account for his devotion to a sect that is so hostile to assimilated American identification, and so hospitable to the divisive, anti-Semitic, racially inflammatory message of a Muslim race-baiter.

Demercrats
item by Erik Rush

How many Americans would vote for a presidential candidate who was the member of a church that professed the following credo?

1. Commitment to God
2. Commitment to the White Community
3. Commitment to the White Family
4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education
5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence
6. Adherence to the White Work Ethic
7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect
8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness”
9. Pledge to make the fruits of all developing and acquired skills available to the White Community
10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and Supporting White Institutions
11. Pledge allegiance to all White leadership who espouse and embrace the White Value System
12. Personal commitment to embracement of the White Value System.

The question is rhetorical, of course. The answer is that such a candidate wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected dog catcher...let alone President, because that candidate would be instantly branded a racist, among the most vile and frightening of white supremacists. And those holding the branding irons would be 100% right.

Yet, in the “About” section of the U.S. Senate website for Barack Obama, Democratic senator from Illinois and contender for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, it states that Obama and his family “live on Chicago’s South Side where they attend Trinity United Church of Christ.”

So…? Well, to say that the Trinity United Church of Christ (http://www.tucc.org) is afrocentric in the extreme would be a gross understatement. It’s not simply afrocentric, it’s African-centric. In fact, one could argue that this organization worships things African to a far greater degree than they do Christ, and gives the impression of being a separatist “church” in the same vein as do certain supremacist “white brethren” churches – or even Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.

Shocking? An overstatement? An overreaction? One can see for oneself on the Trinity United Church website, which is replete with confirmation of what I present here.

What follows is an excerpt from their Mission Statement:

“We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian.... Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent.

We are an African people, and remain “true to our native land,” the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism.

It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community.

“Trinity United Church of Christ adopted the Black Value System written by the Manford Byrd Recognition Committee chaired by Vallmer Jordan in 1981. We believe in the following 12 precepts and covenantal statements. These Black Ethics must be taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever Blacks are gathered. They must reflect on the following concepts:

1. Commitment to God
2. Commitment to the Black Community
3. Commitment to the Black Family
4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education
5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence
6. Adherence to the Black Work Ethic
7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect
8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness”
9. Pledge to make the fruits of all developing and acquired skills available to the Black
Community
10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and
Supporting Black Institutions
11. Pledge allegiance to all Black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value
System
12. Personal commitment to embracement of the Black Value System.”

Sound familiar? Of course it is, since it’s identical to the 12-point list at the beginning of this column – the one from the theoretical white supremacist candidate’s church; the only difference is the substitution of the word “Black” for “White.”

Trinity United Church of Christ’s congregation also claims to hold to a “10-point Vision” which is similarly afrocentric or, if you will, separatist. Again, like the Nation of Islam, a white separatist church or the Branch Davidians, Trinity United more resembles a cult than a church. Only this one has as one of its most prominent members a serious contender for the White House. And George W. Bush’s born-again Christian status scares people?

These revelations, of course shed all the light we need on Obama’s inscrutability; since before he announced his candidacy, both the Right and Left have commented on the lack of information vis-à-vis just who Barack Obama is and what he’s about.

From The Chicago Tribune, February 6, 2007, column "Against Middleclassness?" by Rich Lowry: “Vallmer Jordan, a church member who helped draft the precepts, said they were designed to empower the black community and counter a value system imposed by whites. ‘The big question mark was racism,’ he said. ‘Black disempowerment was an integral part of that historical value system. It became increasingly apparent to me that we black people had not developed our own value system . . . to help us overcome all we knew we had to battle.’”

“A value system imposed by whites…” Is Jordan speaking of the value system that kept families together and promoted morality, industry and integrity, or the one imposed by Liberal dependency pimps since the Civil Rights Movement?

True enough that many blacks did abandon values; again, this was due to the corruption of the black clergy by white socialists and their black foremen.

Trinity United seems to have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Gravitation toward an Africanized “year-round Kwanzaa”-based pseudo-Christianity seems less of a solution than returning to the moral and social conservatism Blacks held prior to the aforementioned socialists gaining their stranglehold in the black community.

So is Obama seeking to be our first black president, or our first stealth black nationalist president?

You see, were he a run-of-the-mill insincere Christian of convenience like Bill Clinton, Obama might belong to a run-of-the-mill, lukewarm, large nondescript church. But he doesn’t.

He belongs to a church which is (as I indicated before) blatantly afrocentric and even suggests the supremacy of Africa’s descendants in America. Granted that the Left will have no qualms about this highly questionable affiliation, but what about all of the American swing voters to whom Obama has built broad appeal by presenting himself as sort of a generic, open-minded moderate Democrat (as Bill Clinton also did, by the way)? Are they going to go for a candidate whose heart is actually closer to that of a refined Black Panther?

Trinity United clearly embraces things African above things American. The content of their website makes this undeniably clear. Aside from this tack being divisive, separatist and calling into question its adherents’ identification as Americans, if they’re looking for values, they – and Obama – would be better served by looking to modern political conservatives and traditional Christianity than retrograde African precepts and the Democrat Party.

Obama’s affiliation with this church, if I must call it that, should be as alarming to the American voter as a Republican candidate for president belonging to the Aryan Brethren Church of Christ. Any argument against this assertion is politically-correct delusion, reverse discrimination and a hypocrisy – a very dangerous one.

Republicans Relieved as Barack Obama Dispatches Formidable Hillary Clinton

2008-02-21T19:18:00.000-08:00

John F. Kennedy was not an all-out Liberal, and in fact campaign records show that he donated money to one of Richard Nixon's early campaigns. When he ran against Nixon in the 1960 presidential election, he was able to get out to Nixon's right on some foreign policy issues, and to paint the Republican as soft on Communism.

Barack Obama couldn't do that to Rudy Giuliani, much less John McCain. And of course he wouldn't want to. His Senate voting record is to the left of Teddy Kennedy's, Dick Durbin's and Charles Schumer's. But this will leave him less room for maneuver in September and October, when the conventional wisdom is that both candidates contest for moderate and independent votes.

Obama might defy that conventional wisdom, and turn out enough hip-hop youngsters and swooning celebrity worshippers to win without making any concessions to the center. I believe it's possible. But Republicans don't think he can, and according to Christopher Ruddy of Newsmax, they're breathing a sigh of relief as they see Obama putting Hillary out of business.

Here's his article:

Why the GOP Loves Obama
by Christopher Ruddy

Republicans this week are breathing a deep sigh of relief.

What was seen as a washout for them this coming November — with big losses expected in the House and Senate and a catastrophic loss of the White House — is now shaping up to be less ominous.

With the Democrats moving to pick Sen. Barack Obama as their nominee, the Republicans see a real opportunity to keep the Oval Office in GOP hands.

There is no question that the Republicans had viewed Hillary Clinton as the most formidable of the Democratic candidates.

During one of the primary debates, Obama suggested that the Republicans were “comfortable” attacking Hillary, suggesting they actually wanted her to be the nominee. Au contraire. Republicans were attacking Mrs. Clinton because they believed she would be the nominee. They could hardly foresee Obama’s rise.

Indeed, she was the Democratic front-runner and hence the focus of their attacks. Now, Obama is discovering that he’s the focus of Republican scrutiny, with John McCain highlighting Obama's accommodationist views with tyrants.

The glee seen in GOP eyes this week can be chalked up to the clearly visible fault lines shaping up for the November election, a seismic battle between McCain and Obama.

There are many reasons the GOP would rather face Obama. Here are some of the best reasons:
Obama is the risky liberal. Every time the Democrats run a liberal like Obama, who the National Journal reports has a 100 percent liberal voting record, they lose.

Remember President McGovern, President Dukakis, President Kerry? Mrs. Clinton, however, has been quite clever in her record and rhetoric to come across as more moderate. In New York state she consistently won hardcore Republican districts in her two Senate races.

A McCain insider told me this week that Obama’s support — for example, for driver's licenses for illegals — is worth at least “five percentage points in the election.” Mrs. Clinton was smart enough to back away from that hot-button issue.

Obama energizes Democratic voters. It’s been talked about quite a bit that Obama is a charismatic man who energizes young voters. But young voters notoriously don’t vote.
Remember all the hoopla in the last election with MTV and its “Vote or Die” campaign to bring out antiwar young voters for President Kerry?

Indeed, Obama, as the first African-American candidate of a major party, will energize black voters. But don’t the Democrats know that black voters vote as a bloc for them already?

What does Obama actually bring to the table for Democrats? It’s not clear. Mrs. Clinton, as her longtime critic Dick Morris likes to point out, would have most assuredly energized women voters, especially millions of single moms that have never voted before.

Obama’s Latino problem. Clearly Latino or Hispanic voters are shaping up to be the key swing vote in this election, as they have been in recent elections. Some political pundits say George Bush’s come-from-behind win in 2004 was due to the solid 40 percent of Hispanics who voted for him, tipping the election in his favor.

This year was shaping up to be a terrible year for the GOP vis-à-vis Hispanic voters. But in primary after primary, Obama has had great difficulty winning over Latino voters.
Even in Illinois, where he beat Hillary to 2 to 1 in the primary, he only captured 52 percent of his home state’s Hispanic vote.

There are a variety of explanations for Obama’s Latino problem, including the belief there is an ethnic rivalry between Hispanics and blacks. Hispanics would like to see a Latino president in the White House, so the theory goes.

Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, has done extremely well among Latino voters, perhaps owing to her husband’s likeability among these voters.

The recent primaries show Obama improving with Hispanic voters. Republicans, however, believe the problem with this key group will persist.

And then there is John McCain, who is the one Republican who is very well liked by Latino voters. He’s also a strong leader, which Hispanics respect. He’s pro-immigrant. As we all know, McCain joined Ted Kennedy in backing the recent immigration bill.

There’s little doubt Hillary could keep the Democratic stranglehold on Latino voters. Obama won’t.

Obama’s naiveté. Don’t forget, America is still in a war on terror. It is doubtful America will be tempted to go for an untested leader, no matter how charismatic he may be.

Some have drawn the comparison between Obama and JFK’s election win in 1960 during the height of the Cold War. But the Kennedy-Obama comparison is a weak one. For starters, John Kennedy was a war hero when he was elected president. Obama can make no such claim.

Kennedy also had far more Washington experience in Congress and the Senate than Obama.

JFK also had his well-known father Joe at his side. And Democrats like to forget this, but Kennedy outflanked Nixon on defense issues, arguing that Nixon was too soft on communism. Obama’s dovish complaints about the Bush administration being too hawkish on terror won’t resonate with middle-of-the-road voters.

With good reason, the GOP is feeling better, finding its second wind as it coalesces around John McCain.

Despite some differences with the maverick senator, the Republican base will turn out for him. His $12 million fundraising haul for January is just one sign of that.

But there are many other reasons the GOP is more comfortable with Hillary out of the picture and Obama as the nominee.

First, Obama will not be able to lay claim to the good economic times of the 1990s that Bill Clinton presided over, as Hillary can.

And Obama will be a nightmare for Democrats with swing voters in key states. Take for example the highly influential Cuban-American vote that Bill Clinton won in 1992 and 1996 — and was the key reason George Bush beat Al Gore.

The Cuban vote has been moving into the Democratic column but they will not go for Obama because he has clearly stated he will open up relations with Castro.

Sen. Clinton’s announced Cuba policies take a hard line, which resonates with these voters. And then there are the key Jewish communities in swing states like Florida and Ohio that are already deeply worried about electing Obama to the presidency.

Obama has talked openly about sitting down — without any preconditions — with Iran’s diabolical leader Ahmadinejad, who just this week referred to Israel as “bacteria” and has said in the past that the Jewish state is a “disgraceful blot” that should be “wiped off the map.”

With the McCain campaign blanketing key markets with TV ads featuring “independent Democrat” Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Obama will be in deep trouble.

The Democrats haven’t completely abandoned Hillary. But it sure looks that way.

There’s an oft-quoted saying that the Democrats “fall in love and Republicans fall in line.”

After this November, we may have to change that to “Democrats often like to run off the side of a cliff and the Republicans love to watch them.”

© 2008 Newsmax.

Divining Barack Obama's Core Beliefs from Wife Michelle's Written Speeches

2008-02-21T16:47:00.000-08:00

Jacqueline Kennedy, so far as I know, never made a controversial public statement while she was First Lady, or while JFK was campaigning for the office. If JFK had been a stealth candidate, there would have been no way to estimate his true views by his wife's comments.

Barack Obama's core beliefs are, by comparison to JFK's, secret. His message bodyguards are attempting to make his true views off-limits even to speculation. Themes of unity and change are to supplant any untidy specifics of agenda and implementation.

Recalcitrant analysts are therefore left to extrapolate Obama's views from the views of those with whom he has chosen to keep company: Jeremiah Wright Jr., Al Sharpton, Bernie Sanders, Paul Simon and, of course, Michelle Robinson Obama.

Here is Ronald Kessler's recent effort at doing so.

The Real Barack Obama
by Ronald Kessler

Michelle Obama’s comment that, for the first time in her adult life, she feels proud of America helps crystallize who Barack Obama is.

To be sure, the wife of a candidate is perfectly free to have views that are distinct from her husband’s. But on a matter that is so fundamental to one’s being as love of country, it is difficult to imagine that Michelle Obama would publicly twice make such a statement suggesting disdain for America unless she felt it comported with her husband’s views.

Equally important, her statement aligns perfectly with the hate-America views of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s minister, friend, and sounding board for more than two decades. On the Sunday following 9/11, Wright characterized the terrorist attacks as a consequence of violent American policies. Four years later, Wright suggested that the attacks were retribution for America’s racism.

“In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01,” Wright wrote in his church magazine Trumpet. “White America and the Western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.”

Wright has been a key supporter of Louis Farrakhan, and in December, honored the Nation of Islam leader for lifetime achievement, saying he “truly epitomize[s] greatness.” Farrakhan has repeatedly made hate-filled statements targeting Jews, whites, America, and homosexuals.

Those who think two of the closest people to Obama could publicly make anti-America statements unless Obama himself felt that way, are fooling themselves. To date, Obama has proven himself to be nothing more than a great orator, rendering the statements of those around him even more important in illuminating his true character and agenda.

During his Senate career, he skipped 17 percent of the votes and sponsored only one bill that became law. That bill was to promote “relief, security, and democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

Bereft of official accomplishments, Obama has distinguished himself mainly by being against measures that protect American security, such as finishing the mission in Iraq. If we were to leave Iraq quickly, as Obama vows he would do, it would become a launch pad for al-Qaida attacks on the U.S.

Obama avoided voting on extending the Protect America Act, thus putting America at risk when immediate interception of terrorist communications is required. Last August, Obama voted against a measure that would have allowed the U.S. to continue to monitor overseas conversations of terrorists like Osama bin Laden without first obtaining a warrant. If his radical vote had prevailed, bin Laden would have been given the same rights as Americans.

To this day, Obama has not distanced himself from most of Rev. Wright’s comments.

In a statement supposedly issued to address the matter, Obama ignored the point that his minister and friend had spoken adoringly of Farrakhan and that Wright’s church was behind the award to the Nation of Islam leader. Instead, as outlined in a Jan. 17 Newsmax article, he disingenuously claimed he thought the magazine bestowed the award on Farrakhan for his efforts to rehabilitate ex-prisoners.

Neither Wright’s encomiums about Farrakhan nor the Trumpet article mentions ex-prisoners.

Similarly, after John McCain’s wife Cindy responded to Michelle Obama’s remarks by telling a Wisconsin rally, “I have, and always will be, proud of my country,” Barack Obama told a radio interviewer that his wife did not say what people think she said. He then proceeded to rewrite her comments, claiming that she had meant she was encouraged by the “large numbers of people” who have gotten involved in the political process. Michelle Obama then made a similar revision of her remarks.

In her speech in Milwaukee, Michelle Obama said flatly, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”

And what has been wrong with America up to now? That it gave Michelle the opportunity to attend Princeton and Harvard Law School? That it gave Barack Obama the chance to attend Harvard and Harvard Law School and become a U.S. senator making more than $1 million a year from book royalties?

Was it that America stopped Nazi Germany from continuing to murder millions of Jews? That America has provided Africa and other countries with $15 billion to combat the spread of AIDS/HIV and that another $30 billion is on the way? That 46 percent of all Americans classified by the Census Bureau as poor own their own homes, 76 percent of them have air conditioning, and 75 percent of them have at least one car? Or that America allows us to express our views freely without fear of being put in jail, as is the case in Russia?

A lawyer, Michelle Obama is perfectly capable of expressing herself precisely. In fact, she spoke from a written speech.

Those who do not want to believe she meant what she said — and that Barack Obama could not be so close to Rev. Wright if he did not himself believe in much of what he has said — are in denial.

The real Barack Obama is starting to emerge, and for those of us who are grateful to America for everything it represents, it is not a pretty sight.

Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com.

Now, Michelle Obama is Proud of America

2008-02-20T18:07:00.000-08:00

John F. Kennedy was blessed, most agree, with the perfect political wife - Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. To the best of my knowledge, she never embarrassed or disadvantaged him.

Barack Obama, too, is blessed with a "keeper." Michelle Obama grew up in a stable two-parent family, went to Princeton as an undergraduate, then Harvard Law School, then returned to her native Chicago for a richly compensated legal career. She is, by all accounts, a devoted mother to their two daughters.

"Michelle Obama has achieved enormous professional success, political influence and personal acclaim in America," writes conservative blogger Michelle Malkin. "Ivy League-educated, she's been lauded by Essence magazine as one of the 25 World's Most Inspiring Women; by Vanity Fair as one of the 10 World's Best-Dressed Women; and named one of "The Harvard 100" most influential alumni. She has had an amazingly blessed life. But you wouldn't know it from her campaign rhetoric and her griping about her and her husband's student loans."

Although Mrs. Obama communicates for a living, she has brought discredit on her husband this week by an appalling gaffe.

In Wisconsin, Mrs. Obama told supporters Monday that "people in this country are ready for change, and hungry for a different kind of politics and let me tell you something, for the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback."

"America hasn't been good to her?" asks blogger Jim Geraghty in The Campaign Spot. "What, opportunities to go to Princeton, Harvard Law, working for top-shelf law firms and hospitals, sitting on the board of directors for a major Wal-Mart supplier — that's not enough?"

"If American ingenuity, a robust constitutional republic and the fall of communism don't do it for you, hon, then how about American heroism and sacrifice?" writes Malkin. "How about every Memorial Day? Every Veterans Day? Every Independence Day? Every Medal of Honor ceremony? Has she never attended a welcome home ceremony for the troops?"

"Michelle Obama is 44 years old," writes Commentary magazine editor John Podhoretz. " She has been an adult since 1982. Can it really be there has not been a moment during that time when she felt proud of her country?

"Forget matters like the victory in the Cold War; how about only things that have made liberals proud — all the accomplishments of inclusion? How about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991? Or Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s elevation to the Supreme Court? Or Carol Moseley Braun’s election to the Senate in 1998? How about the merely humanitarian, like this country’s startling generosity to the victims of the tsunami? I’m sure commenters can think of hundreds more landmarks of this sort. Didn’t she even get a twinge from, say, the Olympics?"

"The narcissistic, self centered, arrogant insult delivered by Michelle Obama," writes Liberal blogger and Clinton supporter Taylor Marsh, " is a slap at the American spirit that runs throughout this country, regardless of political party, race, gender, creed, religion, you name it. "

"I am a proud American first," she writes, "a liberal second. But Michelle Obama will never speak for me."

Malkin who, like Obama, is a woman of color and working mother of two, cited Michael Kinsley to the effect that a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth. "In this case, it's what happens when an elite Democratic politician's wife says what a significant portion of the party's base really believes to be the truth: America is more a source of shame than pride."

But "even Dennis Kucinich would probably have no problem finding something to be proud of in the past two decades," blogger Mickey Kaus writes in Kausfiles. "If Michelle Obama's default position is set to 'Aggrieved,' it also suggests something personal, no?"

It's personal for John and Cindy McCain.

"I'm proud of my country," Cindy McCain, wife of the Arizona senator, told supporters Tuesday as she introduced her husband at a rally. "I don't know if you heard those words earlier. I'm very proud of my country."

"I have never lived a day, in good times or bad, that I haven't been proud of the privilege" of being an American, the senator said in his victory speech Tuesday night.

Who Will Name the Next Supreme Court Justice, and Whom Will He Name?

2008-02-19T03:34:00.000-08:00

Conservative Republicans are suffering considerable anxiety about Sen. John McCain's likelihood of being Soutered should he have the opportunity to nominate a Supreme Court nominee.

As a judge of character, he hasn't inspired much confidence by welcoming Mark McKinnon, Juan Hernandez, Jerry Perenchio and Janet Murguia into his inner counsels, and it was McCain himself who said last month that "I'll rely on people to judge me by the company that I keep."

It was hard enough for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush to identify reliable conservative judges to nominate to the Supreme Court. Even George W. Bush flirted with an ambiguous nomination, in Harriet Miers. Is McCain motivated to get it right?

He has said nice things about Janice Rogers Brown, a brilliant conservative jurist comparable in intellect to Robert Bork, and perhaps comparable also in her prospects of Senate confirmation. One has to wonder if McCain isn't just mentioning Brown as bait to gather vagrant conservatives back to the fold before the general election, knowing full well that he'll have to back off Brown and submit a more ambiguous nominee.

Ah, for the good old days when a president could send a nominee to the Hill with confidence that the Democrats there would bring it to a vote. They might be rejected, as LBJ and Nixon found out, but the Senators had to stand up and make their case against the nominee, and bring it to a vote promptly.

President Kennedy's only appointment to the Court was Byron White from Ft. Collins, Colorado. White was an All-American football player nicknamed "Whizzer," and a member of Phi Beta Kappa at the Univ. of Colorado, from which he graduated as valedictorian in 1938. He then went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar (1939-40), and received his law degree at Yale in 1946 after serving in the Navy in World War II.

White served (1946-47) as law clerk for Chief Justice Frederick Vinson before going to Denver to practice corporate law. He supported Kennedy for the presidency in 1960, and was appointed deputy attorney general in 1961. In 1962, Kennedy nominated him to succeed Justice Charles Whittaker on the Supreme Court.

How would Barack Obama's first Supreme Court nomination compare to JFK's? Well, don't get your hopes up. In today's partisan cage-fighting, White would stand no chance of confirmation. He was one of two justices to dissent from the Roe v. Wade (1973) abortion decision, and in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) he wrote a decision that upheld Georgia's sodomy statutes. And in an Obama presidency, White would have no chance of nomination in the first place. Obama never met an abortion he didn't like, including partial-birth (infanticidal) abortion.

If William Kunstler were still alive and young enough, I think he would be the ideal Obama appointment. Perhaps he'll settle for Lawrence Tribe or Bill Lann Lee, or shore up his credentials with Latinos by nominating Carlos Moreno. Of these, Moreno is the least partisan and least controversial. But here is my prediction: John Edwards.

Edwards would be a reliable vote for the edgy government programs that Obama has hinted at, and his antics might affect the collegial operation of the court such that some older members might elect to retire, further empowering Obama to fill the court with Balkanized, collectivist, pro-abortion, pro-gay Justices. By providing Edwards the venue of the Supreme Court for his class resentment themes, Obama would satisfy Edwards' enormous appetite for the spotlight but remove him as a 2012 primary challenger, thus freeing Obama to make strategic symbolic moves toward the center during his re-election campaign.

Chicago Politics That Made Obama "Lucky"

2008-02-18T08:31:00.000-08:00

Like JFK, Obama's credentials are a bit thin for a presidential candidate. Here, on TownHall.com, his hometown radio host Guy Benson describes the mean Chicago politics that have vaulted a relatively unaccomplished ward heeler to the cusp of the presidency in the period it takes most people to get through grade school.

The Opportunistic Rise of Barack Obama
By Guy Benson

Unlike most seasoned politicians, who earn presidential nominations through many years of legislative, executive, or military accomplishments, Obama has exploited his rock-star status to skip to the front of the line.

By now it's a familiar tale: On July 27, 2004, Barack Obama strode to the podium at the Democratic National Convention and captivated the nation with a soaring and memorable keynote address entitled "The Audacity of Hope."

The speech marked America's first encounter with a rising political star. By the time Obama took the stage in Boston, he was already a shoo-in to become the next United States Senator from Illinois; he enjoyed a massive lead in the polls back home, where the state Republican Party was in total disarray and his carpet-bagging opponent seemed to specialize in alienating voters.

Since that summer night more than three years ago, Obama has rocketed into the political stratosphere and now faces the possibility—if not the probability—of becoming his party's standard-bearer in the 2008 election.

Several questions still linger. How did Barack Obama rise from relative obscurity to his current level of prominence? How many Americans have heard of Alice Palmer, Blair Hull, or Jack Ryan? These names may hold no significance to the legions who now chant "yes we can," but they are names that Barack Obama should remember well.

The mainstream press, which affords Obama nearly unanimous glowing coverage, has repeatedly failed to report a reality that doesn't quite fit the Obama-as-Messiah narrative. Namely, that this self-stylized agent of hope and change is a political opportunist extraordinaire.

Barack Obama's dizzying ascendancy to political celebrity has been marked by less-than-inspirational bare-knuckle politics, an unremarkable legislative career, and a slew of lurid scandals that conveniently sunk formidable opponents.

Obama's first big break came in 1995 when Democratic Congressman Mel Reynolds resigned from office amid allegations of a sexual relationship with an underage girl. As state officials convened a special election, a venerable Chicago politician and civil rights leader named Alice Palmer chose to vacate her State Senate seat to pursue the open Congressional slot. After she was defeated handily, Palmer returned to run for re-election, only to discover that her hand picked successor was unwilling to relinquish his spot on the ballot.

Though a series of legal challenges, Barack Obama strong-armed Palmer—and several other Democratic challengers—off the ballot, clearing a path to victory by destroying all potential competition.

During his unexceptional tenure in Springfield, Obama managed to rack up 129 "present" votes, including numerous noncommittal tallies on controversial issues such as abortion and gun rights.

He also developed a curious, albeit rare, pattern of registering incorrect votes—including an accidental "no" vote on a hotly contested child welfare bill. When confronted with his mistaken vote, Obama asserted that he was "unaware" that he had voted the way he had, and asked that the record reflect that he had "intended" to vote the other way. Similar cases of supposed vote-casting confusion afflicted Obama on five additional occasions.

As the 2004 general election approached, Obama began to eye greener pastures. He decided to run for US Senate, positioning himself as an antiwar candidate. His longshot effort attracted throngs of college students, yet Obama gained little traction against the party's frontrunner, millionaire Blair Hull.

But a bombshell scandal resurrected Obama's prospects. In amazingly short order, Hull experienced what the Chicago Tribune described as "the most inglorious campaign implosion in Illinois political history." Late in the primary race, unsealed divorce papers revealed allegations that Hull had verbally and physically abused his ex-wife. The Hull campaign tanked, and Team Obama celebrated. The nomination was theirs.

Illinois political observers then turned their attention to what promised to be a fiercely competitive general election race between Obama and GOP frontrunner Jack Ryan, a well-funded, charismatic businessman.

Once again, however, scandal lurked in sealed divorce papers. Over the objections of both Ryan and his ex-wife—actress Jeri Ryan—the damning documents were made public, and the resulting headlines were salacious: Ryan had allegedly pressured his wife to visit sex clubs. Like Reynolds and Hull before him, Ryan dropped out of public life in disgrace, with Obama happily playing the role of beneficiary.

With Jack Ryan out of the picture, a desperate Republican Party trotted out a polarizing non-Illinoisan to face Obama in the fall. Alan Keyes' disastrous Senate campaign is perhaps best remembered for Keyes' spate of vicious, counterproductive attacks launched against Obama, including the assertion that Jesus Christ himself would have voted against Obama. The rout was on.

DNC organizers, anticipating Obama's assured victory and recognizing his potential widespread appeal, wisely offered him a coveted primetime speaking slot during the summer convention.

Although the Beantown gathering was designed to be a political infomercial for the ill-fated Kerry/Edwards ticket, Obama stole the show with a speech that inspired millions and, more-importantly, transformed him into an instant media darling. Obama had seized his moment and smashed a rhetorical homerun. Less than half a Senate term later, he announced his Presidential bid.

Now only two figures impede Obama's path to the presidency. Unless Hillary Clinton can revitalize her sputtering campaign, or John McCain can defy the political odds and prevail in a tough electoral climate for Republicans, Barack Obama will become our next Commander-In-Chief.

Unlike most seasoned politicians, who earn presidential nominations through many years of legislative, executive, or military accomplishments, Obama has exploited his rock-star status to skip to the front of the line.

With many of his supporters apparently distracted by his powerful persona and vague, uplifting message, few people seem to notice, or care, that Obama's qualifications to be president are more than a bit thin. Americans would be well-served to shake themselves from the "change" trance long enough to examine Senator Obama's relatively meager record.

Guy Benson is the host of The Guy Benson Show on 560 WIND-AM in Chicago.

McKinnon Poised to Bolt McCain Campaign

2008-02-17T14:06:00.000-08:00

McCain aide Mark McKinnon says he will quit the campaign if Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination.

McKinnon — a Democrat-turned Republican who was President Bush’s chief media adviser in 2004 — told National Public Radio he would leave the McCain team to avoid involvement in any attacks on Obama.

“I met Barack Obama. I read his book. I like him a great deal,” he said. “I disagree with him on very fundamental issues. But I think … it would be a great race for the country and I would simply be uncomfortable being in a campaign that would be inevitably attacking Barack Obama. I think it would be uncomfortable for me, and I think it would be bad for the McCain campaign.”

Hmm. He disagrees with Obama on fundamental issues, but he'll resign from McCain's campaign rather than oppose him. He's willing to run attack ads on Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, but not Barack Obama. And he was the chief media advisor to George W. Bush in 2004. I think this guy is a compelling argument for adding a 53rd card to the Deck of Weasels.

Seriously, Mr. McKinnon obviously has identified Obama as a winner, and is positioning himself for a place at the table - or perhaps some more tangible reward - this time next year.

His highly attenuated loyalty also raises some important questions for Republicans. First, is "big tent" Republicanism really a good idea? They've got moles like McKinnon poised to bolt when they most need him, and they've got Log Cabin "Republicans" directing most of their campaign dollars to Democrats. Can leftists ever have anything but contempt for grass-roots conservative Republicans?

Second, what does this McKinnon affair say about McCain as a judge of character? What other moles would he escort into the inner sanctum? Is he the Most Likely to Be Soutered of the Class of 2008? It was tough enough for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush to identify conservatives for nomination to the Supreme Court. Is McCain up to it?

McCain's selling point, I suppose, is that he's not Barack Obama. Who's on Obama's short list for Supreme Court nomination? Now that William Kunstler has died, one has to assume that John Edwards has moved up the list. He would be a dependable vote for the edgy new government programs Obama has hinted at, and by enthroning him, Obama would remove him as a challenger in 2012.

John Kennedy's Supreme Court legacy was to nominate Byron White, the last pro-life Justice appointed by a Democrat, and one of the few by either party.

.

Obama Afraid to Debate?

2008-02-17T13:53:00.000-08:00

A recent Clinton ad accuses Obama of dodging a debate at Marquette University in Wisconsin. Clinton accepted the invitation, but Obama didn't answer.

In the 1960 debate between Sen. John Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon, which was the first televised presidential debate, most radio listeners concluded that Nixon had won. However, most television viewers said Kennedy won. Nixon appeared without make-up, and looked sweaty and nervous compared to the relaxed, composed Kennedy.

Focus groups have generally reported Obama at a disadvantage to Clinton during head-to-head debates, although he is quite good. The conventional wisdom is that there's little for a frontrunner to gain from a debate with his challenger, and it appears that Obama is showing less enthusiasm for debates now than when he was an insurgent underdog.

Senator, You're No Jack Kennedy

2008-02-16T08:28:00.000-08:00

"Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."

Who can forget the late Sen. Lloyd Bentsen's zinger to young Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice presidential debates? Quayle, at age 41, was considered green although he had served three terms in the House and was twice elected to the Senate before George H.W. Bush tapped him as his running mate.

Yet Barack Obama is widely accorded the gravitas of a legitimate contender for the post-9/11 presidency although he not only is no Jack Kennedy, he's no Dan Quayle.

"The reality is that Obama has a lot in common with Harriet Miers," writes blogger John Hawkins. "Yes, he has accomplished a lot in his life compared to most people, just as she had, but she was still completely unqualified for the job she wanted to fill just as Barack Obama is completely unqualified to be President of the United States."

Why the rush to the White House? Why the urgency to run now, without the seasoning that we like to see in the leader of the Free World? Is it just an obey your thirst thing? Is he going to be a green, untested president just because he can? Here again, Hawkins is insightful, in a post entitled "Barack Obama: A Human Hallmark Card for President."

"Barack can't wait around and get some seasoning because in another term or two, his incredibly liberal voting record would make him unelectable," Hawkins writes. "He is, after all, the single most liberal senator in the entire Senate. Do you realize what that means? It means that Ted Kennedy, Dick Durbin, and Chuck Schumer are all to Barack Obama's right."

Is it small-minded or backward-looking or unfair to point out Obama's lack of qualifications for the enormous responsibility he seeks? Well, Ronald Reagan called Bentsen's well-rehearsed J.F.K. remark "a cheap shot."

But Dukakis/Bentsen campaign manager Susan Estrich replied that "when the Republicans call something 'a cheap shot,' you know you've scored a direct hit." That is perhaps not the best guide for one's conscience, but neither is its converse. A point is not invalidated by its protest or dismissal by a self-interested, self-serving partisan.

Obama’s International Socialist Connections

2008-02-15T23:16:00.000-08:00

By Cliff Kincaid

Campaign workers for Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama are under fire for displaying a flag featuring communist hero Che Guevara. But Obama has his own controversial socialist connections. He is, in fact, an associate of a Chicago-based Marxist group with access to millions of labor union dollars and connections to expert political consultants, including a convicted swindler.

Obama's socialist backing goes back at least to 1996, when he received the endorsement of the Chicago branch of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for an Illinois state senate seat. Later, the Chicago DSA newsletter reported that Obama, as a state senator, showed up to eulogize Saul Mendelson, one of the "champions" of "Chicago's democratic left" and a long-time socialist activist.

Obama's stint as a "community organizer" in Chicago has gotten some attention, but his relationship with the DSA socialists, who groomed and backed him, has been generally ignored.

Blogger Steve Bartin, who has been following Obama's career and involvement with the Chicago socialists, has uncovered a fascinating video showing Obama campaigning for openly socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Interestingly, Sanders, who won his seat in 2006, called Obama "one of the great leaders of the United States Senate," even though Obama had only been in the body for about two years.

In 2007, the National Journal said that Obama had established himself as "the most liberal Senator." More liberal than Sanders? That is quite a feat. Does this make Obama a socialist, too?

DSA describes itself as the largest socialist organization in the United States and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International. The Socialist International (SI) has what is called "consultative status" with the United Nations. In other words, it works hand-in-glove with the world body.

The international connection is important and significant because an Obama bill, "The Global Poverty Act," has just been rushed through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, with the assistance of Democratic Senator Joe Biden, the chairman, and Republican Senator Richard Lugar. The legislation (S.2433) commits the U.S. to spending hundreds of billions of dollars more in foreign aid on the rest of the world, in order to comply with the "Millennium Goals" established by the United Nations.

Conservative members of the committee were largely caught off-guard by the move to pass the Obama bill but are putting a "hold" on it, in order to try to prevent the legislation, which also quickly passed the House, from being quickly brought up for a full Senate vote. But observers think that Senate Democrats may try to pass it quickly anyway, in order to give Obama a precious legislative "victory" that he could run on.

Another group associated with the SI is the Party of European Socialists (PES), which heard from Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, back in 2006. Dean's speech is posted on the official Democratic Party website, although the European socialist parties are referred to as "progressive."

Democrats, Dean said, want to be "good citizens of the world community."

He spoke at a session on "Global Challenges for Progressive Politics." Following up, in April 2007, PES President Poul Nyrup Rasmussen reported that European socialists held a meeting "in the Democrats HQ in Washington," met with officials of the party and Democratic members of Congress, and agreed that "PES activist groups" in various U.S. cities would start working together.

The photos of the trip show Rasmussen meeting with such figures as Senator Ben Cardin, Senator Bernie Sanders, officials of the Brookings Institution, Howard Dean, and AFL-CIO President John W. Sweeney, a member of the DSA. The Brookings Institution is headed by former Clinton State Department official Strobe Talbott, a proponent of world government who was recently identified in the book Comrade J as having been a pawn of the Russian intelligence service.

The socialist connections of Obama and the Democratic Party have certainly not been featured in the Washington Post columns of Harold Meyerson, who happens not only to be a member but a vice-chair of the DSA.

Meyerson, the subject of our 2005 column, "A Socialist at the Washington Post," has praised convicted inside-trader George Soros for manipulating campaign finance laws to benefit the far-left elements of the Democratic Party. Obama's success in the Democratic presidential primaries and caucuses is further evidence of Soros's success. Soros has financially contributed to the Obama campaign.

It is not surprising that the Chicago Democrat, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, has endorsed Obama. Schakowsky, who endorsed Howard Dean for president in 2004, was honored in 2000 at a dinner sponsored by the Chicago chapter of the DSA. Her husband, Robert Creamer, emerged from federal prison in November 2006 after serving five months for financial crimes. He pleaded guilty to ripping off financial institutions while running a non-profit group.

Before he was convicted but under indictment, Creamer was hired by the Soros-funded Open Society Policy Center to sabotage John Bolton's nomination as Ambassador to the U.N.

After his release from prison, Creamer released a book, Listen to Your Mother: Stand up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, described by one blogger as the book that was "penned in the pen."

A blurb for the book declares, "Some people think that in order to win, Democrats need to move to the political center by adopting conservative values and splitting the difference between progressive and conservative positions. History shows they are wrong. To win the next election and to win in the long term, we need to redefine the political center."

In addition to writing the book, Creamer is back in business, running his firm, Strategic Consulting Group, and advertising himself as "a consultant to the campaigns to end the war in Iraq, pass universal health care, change America's budget priorities and enact comprehensive immigration reform."

His clients have included the AFL-CIO and MoveOn.org. In fact, his client list is a virtual who's who of the Democratic Party, organized labor, and Democratic Party constituency groups. Creamer's list of testimonials comes from such figures as Democratic Senators Dick Durbin (Ill.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Harold Meyerson, MoveOn.org founder Wes Boyd, and David Axelrod, a "Democratic political consultant."

Axelrod, of course, is much more than just a "Democratic political consultant." He helped State Senator Barack Obama win his U.S. Senate seat in 2004 and currently serves as strategist and media advisor to Obama's presidential campaign.

Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at cliff.kincaid@aim.org

Sorry You Feel That Way, White Interloper and Bloodsucking Jew

2008-02-15T17:41:00.000-08:00

Here are excerpts from Bill Levinson's Jan. 4 post on Israpundit about Barack Obama's stubborn loyalty to Jew-baiting race hustler Al Sharpton.

Obama Campaign Responds to Bigotry Complaint with Patronizing Insult
by Bill Levinson

Imagine the following interchange between an African-American voter and a candidate who has appeared with the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan:

Voter: “It is impossible for me to support someone who promotes and endorses an individual who has called my people the N word, and who has at least indirectly incited a lynching and the firebombing of a Negro church. You should apologize and distance yourself from that Klan leader.”
Candidate: “I’m sorry you feel that way” (or “I’m sorry you’re a Negro.”)

If our readers think such an interchange is highly unlikely, we will now share the Barack Obama campaign’s official response to our complaints about Mr. Obama’s ongoing promotion of the prominent racist and anti-Semite Al Sharpton.

We began with the premise of a candidate associating with and openly promoting a Ku Klux Klan leader who has at least indirectly incited a lynching, and the firebombing of a Negro church in which people were killed.

Al Sharpton played at least an indirect role in fomenting the 1991 Crown Heights pogrom in which a mob yelling “Kill the Jews” did so: a rabbinical student named Yankel Rosenbaum. Sharpton personally called the Jews “diamond merchants” with the blood of innocent children on their hands....

In 1995, a mob from Al Sharpton’s National Action Network – the same organization that Barack Obama endorsed last April – paraded around a Jewish-owned store, Freddy’s Fashion Mart, in Harlem. This mob, under Sharpton’s personal supervision, chanted epithets like “bloodsucking Jew” and “cracker,” to which Sharpton personally added “white interloper.”

Like a Ku Klux Klansman who threatens to burn a Black-owned church or business in the “wrong” neighborhood, one of Sharpton’s people threatened to burn Freddy’s Fashion Mart. Another later put this threat into effect, just like a Kluxer who throws a firebomb into a Black-owned store or church, with the loss of seven innocent lives.

In 1988, Sharpton played a central role in the racist Tawana Brawley scandal, which did immense damage to the reputations of innocent people while costing Dutchess County something like half a million dollars.

We encourage our readers in New York to (ask) the people of Dutchess County, and especially Wappinger Falls, just how much damage Obama’s friend did to their community twenty years ago. Remember, many people now of voting age had not even been born at the time.

This April, Barack Obama appeared at a meeting of the National Action Network–the very same hate organization that shouted slogans like “bloodsucking Jew” and “cracker” at Freddy’s Fashion Mart–where he endorsed this ... organization and its proprietor.

Sen. Barack Obama: “Reverend Sharpton is a voice for the voiceless, and a voice for the dispossessed. What National Action Network has done is so important to change America, and it must be changed from the bottom up.” In November, Obama made at least one more public appearance with (Sharpton), at the Apollo Theater.

We have, in response to numerous unsolicited e-mails from the Obama campaign, called (866) 675-2008 to complain about Mr. Obama’s open promotion of a vicious professional bigot who has built his career by promoting hatred of white people, and especially of Jews. Today, we received an official reply that we can construe only as a patronizing brush-off, if not a deliberate insult:

Dear Friend,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts about Senator Barack Obama and his candidacy for President. Senator Obama welcomes an open dialogue about America’s future, and hopes for the widest possible participation in a great nationwide discussion.

Hearing and exploring different positions and ways of thinking furthers this discussion. It challenges our reasoning, sharpens our analysis of issues, and leads to new solutions. We appreciate having the benefit of your perspective.

One of Senator Obama’s mentors was the late Senator Paul Simon, a man of great ability and integrity. He believed that people could disagree without being disagreeable, and Senator Obama has taken that guiding principle as his own.

Thank you again for contacting Senator Obama.

Sincerely,
Obama for America

The operative statement appears to be, “people can disagree without being disagreeable.” In other words, “We’re sorry you feel that way about our candidate’s public and ongoing promotion of a racist and anti-Semitic hate monger, but we don’t care because we own the Jewish vote anyway.”

It is therefore vital for us to spread the word as widely as possible that Barack Obama has so little respect for common decency that he consorts openly with the (equivalent) of the Ku Klux Klan and the Stormfront White Nationalist Community.

It is ... clear that Obama feels that he can be everything to everybody, and that he does not have to take a principled stand on anything....

Perhaps Obama (can) understand the following: (1) You can’t appear at a tribute to Michael Vick today and at an SPCA meeting tomorrow, and expect the SPCA people to believe that you are really against dog fighting and other forms of animal abuse. (2) You can’t appear at the Ku Klux Klan today and the NAACP tomorrow, and expect African-Americans to believe that you support civil rights. (3) You can’t appear arm in arm with Al Sharpton today and at AIPAC tomorrow, and expect Jewish voters to think you have anything but total contempt for them as well as for common decency.

Why Does Barack Obama's Pastor Matter?

2008-02-10T09:57:00.000-08:00

Here, from FrontPageMagazine.com, is a response to those who suggest it's improper to take Barack Obama's church affiliation into account.

The author is misinformed about the origins of Liberation Theology, which preceded the Cold War. This historical error, however, is irrelevant to - and does not impair - his overall analyis.

In arguing against the notion of white racism as a factor in the disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine penalties, he makes a convincing case in the context of federal legislation, but leaves undiscussed several other factors, including state legislation, local allocation of law enforcement resources, and sentencing in state courts.

Despite these flaws, I think he makes a persuasive argument that Barack Obama owes us a somewhat detailed accounting of his agreements and disagreements with the highly politicized clergyman he has identified as his spiritual mentor.

Why Does Obama's Pastor Matter?
By John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com Monday, February 04, 2008

Barack Obama, in a way that recalls John F. Kennedy, a politician to whom he's frequently compared, has carefully controlled and burnished his image to create the impression of an independent figure, free from dogma and ideological entanglements. But there is one man who threatens to undermine Obama's appealing narrative as a man above the ugly quarrels and divisive partisanship of the past: his longtime pastor and spiritual adviser, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

On March 1, 1972, Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. became the pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), a position he still holds to this day. Because he has been a revered figure in the life of presidential aspirant Barack Obama for two decades, Wright's political views, which he commonly draws from the tenets of liberation theology, are worthy of some scrutiny—if only to shed light on the teachings that have had enough resonance to retain Obama as a TUCC congregant since 1988. So great is Obama's respect for Wright, that the former sought the Reverend's counsel before formally declaring his candidacy for U.S. President.

Moreover, Obama and his wife selected Wright to perform their wedding ceremony and to baptize their two daughters. These are honors of considerable magnitude, and it is reasonable to speculate that if we learn more about Rev. Wright, we may gain some insight into the personal qualities and belief systems Barack Obama holds in high regard.

When we read the writings, public statements, and sermons of Rev. Wright, we quickly notice his unmistakable conviction that America is a nation infested with racism, prejudice, and injustices that make life very difficult for black people. As he declared in one of his sermons: "Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!... We [Americans] believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."

In a similar spirit, Wright laments "the social order under which we [blacks] live, under which we suffer, under which we are killed."[1]

Depicting blacks as a politically powerless demographic, he complains that "African Americans don't run anything in the Capital except elevators."[2]

On its website, Wright's church portrays black people as victims who are still burdened by the legacy of their "pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism," and who must pray for "the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people."Wright detects what he views as racism in virtually every facet of American life. In the business world, for instance, he attributes the high unemployment rate of African Americans to "the fact that they are black."[3]

Vis-à-vis the criminal justice system, he similarly explains that "the brothers are in prison" largely because of their skin color. "Consider the 'three strikes law,'" he elaborates. "There is a higher jail sentencing for crack than for cocaine because more African Americans get crack than do cocaine."[4]

Notwithstanding Wright's implication that the harsh anti-crack penalties were instituted by racist legislators for the purpose of incarcerating as many blacks as possible, the Congressional Record shows that such was not at all the case. In 1986, when the strict, federal anti-crack legislation was being debated, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)—deeply concerned about the degree to which crack was decimating the black community—strongly supported the legislation and actually pressed for even harsher penalties. In fact, a few years earlier CBC members had pushed President Reagan to create the Office of National Drug Control Policy.[5]

In Wright's calculus, white America's bigotry is to blame not only for whatever ills continue to plague the black community, but also for our country's conflicts with other nations. "In the 21st century," says Wright, "white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01. White America and the western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just 'disappeared' as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns."

Remarkably, no mention of jihad—the ageless Muslim tradition of aggressive, permanent warfare whose ultimate aim is to achieve Islam's dominion over the human race at large—managed to find its way into Wright's analysis. Rather, he assured us that the 9/11 atrocities were ultimately traceable to the doorstep of U.S. provocations. In fact, Wright apparently sees no reason to suspect that Islam may be incompatible in any way with Western traditions. "Islam and Christianity are a whole lot closer than you may realize," he has written. "Islam comes out of Christianity."[6]

Apart from America's purported racism, Wright also despises the nation's capitalist economic structure, viewing it as a breeding ground for all manner of injustice. "Capitalism as made manifest in the 'New World,'" says Wright, "depended upon slave labor (by African slaves), and it is only maintained by keeping the 'Two-Thirds World' under oppression."[7]

This anti-capitalist perspective is further reflected in TUCC's "10-point vision," whose ideals include the cultivation of "a congregation working towards ECONOMIC PARITY." Dispelling any doubt that this is a reference to socialism and the wholesale redistribution of wealth, the TUCC mission statement plainly declares its goal of helping "the less fortunate to become agents of change for God who is not pleased with America's economic mal-distribution!"

This view is entirely consistent with Rev. Wright's devotion to the tenets of liberation theology, which is essentially Marxism dressed up as Christianity. Devised by Cold War-era theologians, it teaches that the gospels of Jesus can be understood only as calls for social activism, class struggle, and revolution aimed at overturning the existing capitalist order and installing, in its stead, a socialist utopia where today's poor will unseat their "oppressors" and become liberated from their material (and, consequently, their spiritual) deprivations.

An extension of this paradigm is black liberation theology, which seeks to foment a similar Marxist revolutionary fervor founded on racial rather than class solidarity. Wright's mentor in this discipline is James Cone, author of the landmark text Black Power and Black Theology. Arguing that Christianity has been used by white society as an opiate of the (black) masses, Cone asserts that the destitute "are made and kept poor by the rich and powerful few," and that "[n]o one can be a follower of Jesus Christ without a political commitment that expresses one's solidarity with victims."

Many of Wright's condemnations of America are echoed in his denunciations of Israel and Zionism, which he has blamed for imposing "injustice and … racism" on the Palestinians. According to Wright, Zionism contains an element of "white racism."

Likening Israel's treatment of Palestinians to South Africa's treatment of blacks during the apartheid era, Wright advocates divestment campaigns targeting companies that conduct business in, or with, Israel.

Given Wright's obvious low regard for the U.S. and Israel, it is by no means surprising that he reserves some of his deepest respect for the virulently anti-American, anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

"When Minister Farrakhan speaks, Black America listens," says Wright. "Everybody may not agree with him, but they listen … His depth on analysis when it comes to the racial ills of this nation is astounding and eye opening. He brings a perspective that is helpful and honest. Minister Farrakhan will be remembered as one of the 20th and 21st century giants of the African American religious experience. His integrity and honesty have secured him a place in history as one of the nation's most powerful critics. His love for Africa and African American people has made him an unforgettable force, a catalyst for change and a religious leader who is sincere about his faith and his purpose."

Wright's paean to Farrakhan was parroted in the November/December issue of TUCC's bimonthly magazine, the Trumpet, which featured an interview with the NOI "icon" who, according to the publication, "truly epitomized greatness." "Because of the Minister's influence in the African American community," the Trumpet announced that it was honoring him with an "Empowerment Award" as a "fitting tribute for a storied life well lived."

This seems an odd distinction to confer upon someone whose anti-American, anti-white, anti-Semitic statements are numerous. For example, in 1996 Farrakhan told a Tehran newspaper that God would "bestow upon Muslims" the honor of "destroy[ing] America."

In February 1998, he sent a cordial and supportive letter to Saddam Hussein, calling him a "visionary" who had earned the Iraqi people's "love," and whose demise would "mean a setback for the goal of unity [among Muslims]." In July 2002, he declared that America, "with blood dripping from [its] hands," had no moral authority by which to overthrow Saddam.

In February 2005, he condemned the United States for waging a war "against Islam," adding: "[T]here's no way that I, as a Muslim, could countenance my children or grandchildren fighting a war against fellow believers in any part of the world."

Farrakhan also has a long, well-documented history of venom-laced references to the white "blue-eyed devils" and Jewish "bloodsuckers" who purportedly decimate America's black communities from coast to coast. Moreover, he has referred to white people as "the skunks of the planet."

On a 1984 trip to meet with the Libyan dictator (and America's arch enemy) Muammar Qadhafi, Farrakhan was accompanied by none other than Jeremiah A. Wright.

Farrakhan has long considered Qadhafi to be his trusted "friend," "brother," and "fellow struggler in the cause of liberation for our people." In 1996, the NOI leader formed a partnership with Qadhafi, who pledged $1 billion to help Farrakhan develop a Muslim political lobby in the U.S.

Said Qadhafi: "We agreed with Louis Farrakhan and his delegation to mobilize in a legal and legitimate form the oppressed minorities—and at their forefront the blacks, Arab Muslims and Red Indians—for they play an important role in American political life and have a weight in U.S. elections."

"Our confrontation with America," added Qadhafi, "was [previously] like a fight against a fortress from outside, and today [with the NOI alliance] we found a breach to enter into this fortress and confront it."

Farrakhan's October 16, 1995 Million Man March ranks among the events about which Rev. Wright has written most extensively and passionately. Wright attended the rally with his son, and has described it as "a once in a lifetime, amazing experience."[8]

When a number of prominent African Americans counseled fellow blacks to boycott the demonstration because of Farrakhan's well-documented history of hateful rhetoric, Wright derided those critics as "'Negro' leaders,"[9] "'colored' leaders," "Oreos," and "house niggras"[10] whose most noteworthy trait was their contemptible "Uncle Tomism."[11]

"There are a whole boat load of 'darkies' who think in white supremacist terms," added Wright. "… Some 'darkies' think white women are superior to black women…. Some 'darkies' think white lawyers are superior to black lawyers. Some 'darkies' think white pastors are better than black pastors. There are a whole boatload of 'darkies' who think anything white and everyone white is better than whatever it is black people have."[12]

In the book titled When Black Men Stand up for God, a collection of sermons and reflections on the Million Man March, Wright identifies Kwanzaa founder Maulana Karenga as an attendee of the rally.[13]

In the end notes that follow a transcript of one of Wright's sermons, Karenga is described as "an internationally acclaimed social activist and scholar in Pan African Studies"; "the founder and creator of Kwanzaa, the well-known African American holiday"; and "the director of Pan African Studies and Visiting Lecturer in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside."[14]

Unmentioned is the fact that Karenga is a self-identified "African socialist" whose "Seven Principles of Blackness," which are observed during Kwanzaa, are not only the Marxist precepts of parity and proletariat unity, but are also identical to those of the 1970s domestic terrorist group, the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Nor is it noted that in 1971 Karenga was convicted of torturing two women who were members of United Slaves, a black nationalist cult he had established.On its website, Wright's church describes itself in distinctly racial terms, as being an "Unashamedly Black" congregation of "African people" who are "true to our native land, the mother continent, the cradle of civilization," and who participate in TUCC's "Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community."

Some have suggested that such seemingly exclusionary assertions, coupled with Wright's own racially loaded statements and his close affiliation with Farrakhan, indicate that Wright is guilty of racism. But Wright casually dismisses this charge, stating: "I get tickled every time I hear a 'Negro' call me a racist. They don't even understand how to define the word. Racism means controlling the means."[15]

In other words, Wright employs a rhetorical escape hatch that permits him to evade all charges of racism simply by claiming that only the "dominant" (i.e., white) demographic is capable of such ugliness. The implication is that no deed or utterance, however hateful or vile, is egregious enough to qualify any black person as a racist; that blacks are always the victims of racism, never its perpetrators.

American voters ought to have more than a passing interest in the fact that when Barack Obama formally joined TUCC in 1991, he tacitly accepted this same Jeremiah Wright as a spiritual mentor. Moreover, he pledged allegiance to the church's race-conscious "Black Value System" that encourages blacks to patronize black-only businesses, support black leaders, and avoid becoming "entrapped" by the pursuit of a "black middle-classness" whose ideals presumably would erode their sense of African identity and render them "captive" to white culture.

In addition, voters should examine carefully the question of whether Obama shares Wright's socialist economic preferences. They ought to be aware, for instance, that the Democratic candidate is on record as having said that his religious faith has led him to question "the idolatry of the free market."

Moreover, Obama's voting record and his issue positions show him generally to favor high spending and increased government intervention in all realms of life.

When Rev. Wright's controversial statements and positions recently became more widely publicized, Obama said, "There are some things I agree with my pastor about, some things I disagree with him about." It is the duty of every American voter to determine exactly where those agreements and disagreements lie.

Notes:
[1] When Black Men Stand up for God (Chicago: African American Images), 1996, p. 17.[2] Ibid., p. 102.[3] Ibid., p. 17.[4] Ibid., p. 17.[5] John DiIulio, Jr., "My Black Crime Problem, and Ours," City Journal (Spring 1996), pp. 19-20.[6] When Black Men Stand up for God, p. 16.[7] Blow the Trumpet in Zion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 2005, pp. 8-9.[8] When Black Men Stand up for God, p. 10.[9] Ibid., pp. 11, 37.[10] Ibid., p. 80.[11] Ibid., p. 11.[12] Ibid., p. 81.[13] It should be noted that Wright's church has conducted Kwanzaa programs for its congregants. See When Black Men Stand up for God, p. iv.)[14] When Black Men Stand up for God, p. 25.[15] Ibid., p. 102.

John Perazzo is the Managing Editor of DiscoverTheNetworks and is the author of The Myths That Divide Us: How Lies Have Poisoned American Race Relations. For more information on his book, click here. E-mail him at wsbooks25@hotmail.com

Truth Truck Lets Omaha Know Abortion Is An "Obamanation"

2008-02-08T15:38:00.000-08:00

Omaha, NE - February 8, 2008 -Democratic Presidential candidate Barak Obama was protested by Operation Rescue's Truth Truck and Rescue the Heartland during a visit Thursday to Omaha, Nebraska. An estimated overflow crowd of about 10,000 people attended the campaign stop with the line to get in the door stretching down the street.

For three hours the Truth Truck circled the block around the Omaha Civic Auditorium where Obama appeared.

In a move of questionable legality, police prohibited pro-life protesters from picketing on the public sidewalk around the auditorium. Officers moved protesters across the street.

Obama avidly supports abortion and boasts of a 100% "pro-choice" voting record.

"There's not a dime's worth of difference between Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama on the abortion issue. They are out of touch with Americans, who are becoming increasingly pro-life and are beginning to demand abortion restrictions and outright bans in a number of states," said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman.

"We will continue to expose both candidates at every opportunity. Anyone who cannot respect the life of the most innocent and vulnerable is not fit for public office."

Obama Wins Prominent U.S. Muslims' Endorsements

2008-02-06T19:05:00.000-08:00

The Honourable Al-Imam Warith Deen Muhammad, son of the late Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, has endorsed Barack Obama for president.

"He is the best candidate for the presidency," Muhammad said, according to the Muslim Americans for Obama website.

Born Wallace D. Muhammad, he was installed as Supreme Leader of the Nation of Islam in 1975, and quickly embarked on a path of moderation that brought the sect closer to orthodox Sunni Islam. He renamed the organization several times, settling eventually on the Muslim American Society. He changed the spelling of his name to Mohammed, and later changed his full name and honorific.

A splinter group under Louis Farrakhan rejected Muhammad and left to build their own sect, which reclaimed the name Nation of Islam. Farrakhan and Muhammad reconciled in 2000, after nearly a quarter of a century estranged.

"Dear Muslim brothers and sisters," he declared at the annual Savior's Day convention, "it is not difficult for Minister Farrakhan and Wallace D. Mohammed to embrace each other. That's easy for us. When I first met him in the early '50s, I liked him on first sight, and I became his friend and his brother. And I have not stopped being his friend and his brother. Maybe he has not understood, but I have always been his friend and his brother."

Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, endorsed Obama about a year ago.

"He speaks with a unifying spirit," Ellison said of Obama. He said he supports "Obama's message of an open and fair economy, a balanced prosperity and clear opposition to the war in Iraq."

Ellison has called himself, variously, Keith E. Hakim, Keith X. Ellison and Keith Ellison-Muhammad. Although he used to be a Nation of Islam apologist, he has since denounced Farrakhan's anti-Semitism, and enjoyed some Jewish support in his recent Congressional campaign. He identifies himself as an orthodox Muslim.

Although Ellison's congressional district is Minneapolis, he did much of his fundraising among Florida Muslim members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D.-IL) have acccused of "ties to terrorism," possibly Hamas and Hezbollah.

Obama Picks Up Another Kennedy Endorsement

2008-02-03T19:34:00.000-08:00

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's wife, Maria Shriver, endorsed Barack Obama Sunday, just days after he backed Republican John McCain.

"You know, if Barack Obama was a state, he'd be California," Shriver said at a campus rally. "I mean, think about it: diverse, open, smart, independent, bucks tradition, innovative, inspiring, dreamer, leader!"

"He is about empowering women, African-Americans, Latinos, older people, young people," Shriver enthused. "He's about empowering all of us."

Shriver is hardly in need of empowerment. A niece of JFK, Bobby Kennedy and Teddy Kennedy, she is the daughter of Sargent Shriver, who managed Merchandise Mart in Chicago for the Kennedys before marrying into the clan. JFK appointed his brother-in-law the first director of the Peace Corps, and Shriver later served Presidents Johnson and Nixon as Ambassador to France. After leaving the embassy, he ran for Vice President under George McGovern.

If the governor's wife shares Obama's antiwar sentiment, she comes by it honestly. Sargent Shriver opposed America's entry into WWII, helped found the America First Committee at Yale, and was a member until it was disbanded shortly after Pearl Harbor.

Maria Shriver was on the fast track at NBC News until she resigned in 2003 to be a full-time mom and First Lady of California.

Her endorsement appears to complete a unanimous Kennedy shift to Obama. No Kennedy has won a national election in nearly half a century, but they have retained enough heft to play kingmakers - and spoilers. In 1980, Teddy Kennedy's primary challenge to incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter weakened him before the showdown with eventual winner Ronald Reagan, and in 2004, his support was decisive in John Kerry's campaign for the Democratic nomination.

Despite the themes of redemption and empowerment, the Obama rally was awash in tycoons and celebrities, including Shriver's cousin Caroline Kennedy, singer Stevie Wonder and Oprah Winfrey.

Shriver's endorsement comes just two days before Super Tuesday, when California and 20 other US states will hold primaries. California is one of the most delegate-rich contests, and it is "in play," unlike Illinois and New York, where Obama and Clinton are expected to win their own states handily.

Rupert Murdoch's New York Post Endorses Obama!

2008-02-03T14:35:00.000-08:00

Here, from Charles Warner of the Huffington Post, is an analysis of the New York Post's endorsement of Barack Obama:

The New York Post has surprised many readers with its unexpected endorsement of Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, saying he “represents a fresh start.”

Rupert Murdoch’s Post also opined that Hillary Clinton and her husband “stand for déjà vu all over again — a return to the opportunistic, scandal-scarred, morally muddled years of the almost infinitely self-indulgent Clinton co-presidency.”

But the Obama endorsement “was not about politics or Billary hating as much as it was about business,” Charles Warner observes on The Huffington Post.

Murdoch wants to use his newly acquired Wall Street Journal to challenge the New York Times and his Post to drive the New York Daily News out of business, observes Warner, who speculates on what Murdoch might have been thinking:

“I hate The New York Times and want to position the Post as its opposite, especially after the Times endorsed Billary. By endorsing Obama I appeal to many of my core readers, especially younger ones, which advertisers love.

“By endorsing Obama before the Daily News does, I get a nice little circulation pump and I put the News in a bind — a strategic dilemma. If it endorses Billary” it will perturb many of its readers “and look like it is taking a cue from the Times. If the News endorses Obama, that’s good because it might help defeat Billary, plus it will make it look like it is following the Post — a win/win in either case for me.”

By endorsing Obama, Murdoch “has achieved another edge on the Daily News,” Warner concludes, “even if he had to get under the political bedcovers with liberal Ted Kennedy.”

Is Obama Really a Uniter?

2008-02-03T09:29:00.000-08:00

In the tradition of Yasir Arafat, he speaks one way to his core followers on the street, and another to the public at large. If he is not yet a full-blown media darling, he is fast becoming one. Reporters get a kick out of him, finding him exciting, personable, and a joy to quote. As the liberal New York Post columnist Jack Newfield has pointed out, he is 'dangerous because he is so likable.' And only rarely is (he) held accountable for his offenses, both past and ongoing. The tendency to forget, or to brush aside, is close to overpowering.
No, the National Review's Jay Nordlinger is not writing about Barak Obama here, but about race hustler Al Sharpton, in an essay over seven years old. But it is as much a description of our credulous talking heads and newspapermen as of Sharpton.
How does Sharpton rate identification (only in the mass media) as a "civil rights leader" when he has made his living as a political shakedown artist?
His "Chappaquiddick," as columnist Nat Hentoff called it, was the Tawana Brawley hoax. After staying away from home for several days, young Tawana smeared herself with dog feces, wrote racial epithets on her body, climbed into a garbage bag, and waited to be discovered. Then she claimed she was abducted, raped and otherwise abused by six white men, including a police officer and an assistant district attorney, practicing Irish Republican Army rituals.
Sharpton became the family's press spokesman. Bill Cosby offered a large cash reward for information leading to arrests and convictions, but Sharpton told the family not to cooperate with New York Attorney General Robert Abrams. To cooperate with him, Sharpton said, would be "to sit down with Mr. Hitler."
One of Sharpton's assistants was quoted telling him "Robert Abrams, you are no longer going to masturbate looking at Tawana Brawley's picture."
It was a total, absolute hoax. Sharpton never apologized. Over a decade later, he said "If I had it to do again, I'd do it in the same way." He taunted one of the falsely accused men to sue him if he was innocent, and when the man did, he was subjected to death threats and menacing encounters that can only be attributed to Sharpton.
In the Central Park "wilding" case, a young white woman was set upon by a group of young Black males, who raped and beat her near death. Sharpton came to the rapists' defense, describing them as the equivalent of the "Scottsboro Boys." When the case went to trial, Sharpton brought his group to the courthouse steps where they shouted "whore" at the victim and chanted "the boyfriend did it."
Sharpton brought Tawana Brawley to the courthouse, where she and the jogger's attackers greeted one another warmly. Ever the ready provider of quotable zingers for the media, he said he had brought her there "to see the difference between white justice and Black justice."
When a Hasidic Jew lost control of his car, jumped the curb and killed a Black child, Sharpton decided to throw gasoline on the fire by denouncing a Jewish diamond company that bought South African diamonds, routed them through Tel Aviv and wholesaled them out of a Hasidic neighborhood in New York City. Rioters injured 100 Jews and lynched a rabbinical student.
"All we want to say is what Jesus said: if you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise. You got to pay for your deeds. It's no accident that we know we should not be run over. We are the royal family on this planet. We are the original man."
When a Jewish retailer revoked a Black subtenant's lease in Harlem, Sharpton's National Action Network mounted a series of rallies to intimidate the Jew. Picketers screamed "bloodsucking Jews" and "Jew bastards," and threatened to burn the store down. They taunted a Black security guard as a "cracker lover."
At one of the rallies, Sharpton declared that "we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business."
A Sharpton associate said "we're going to see that this cracker suffers. Reverend Sharpton is on it."
After weeks of escalating rhetoric, one of the overwrought partisans shouted "it's on," rushed into the store with a drawn firearm, and ordered all Blacks out of the store. He shot three whites and a Pakistani, whom he apparently mistook for a Jew, then set the store on fire, which killed five Hispanics, one Guyanese and the Black security guard.
Sharpton never took responsibility for inciting hatred against the Jewish retailer. At first he denied that he ever spoke at the rallies. When tapes proved he had, he was dismissive.
"What's wrong with denouncing white interlopers?" Sharpton asked.
What's Al Sharpton got to do with Barak H. Obama?
Well, the two have appeared together and been photographed together on several occasions. I don't think Obama would pose for photos with David Duke. And Obama has endorsed the activities of the man Richard Brookhiser called "an impresario of hatreds."
"Reverend Sharpton is a voice for the voiceless, and a voice for the dispossessed. What the National Action Network has done is so important to change America, and it must be changed from the bottom up."
If I've taken Obama out of context, I'm willing to be corrected. If you know of any instance where he has expressed disapproval of the way Al Sharpton handled the Tawana Brawley lie, the Central Park wilding, the Jew-lynching Crown Heights riots or the racially motivated shootings and arson on 125th Street, please post them in the Comments section below. I don't want to be unfair to Sen. Obama. But please supply a citation so that readers can look it up and independently verify it.
How would JFK have handled an endorsement by the Provisional Irish Republican Army?
It's safe to say that, despite his sentimental loyalty to Ireland, he would have distanced himself from violent Irish activists at least as emphatically as he distanced himself from the peace-loving bishops of the Catholic church.

Despite his stated ambition to be a uniter, Barak Obama has, thus far, lacked the steel or the inclination to renounce his most bigoted supporters. To date, this has been an asymmetrical factor in his favor. In South Carolina, for example, prominent Black Democrats openly acknowledged their racial motivation in voting for Obama. However, when former President Clinton noted that Jesse Jackson had won the South Carolina primary, he was accused of attempting to "marginalize" Obama by racial subtext.
This advantage is likely to hold as long as the generally left-leaning mass media keep message discipline. If significant media outlets break ranks to hold Obama as accountable as they held George Bush for speaking at Bob Jones University or Trent Lott for praising former Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, the pressure could reach critical mass, at which point Obama may have to denounce his most fanatical supporters or forego outreach to independents and undecideds.

Comparing Barak Hussein Obama and John Fitzgerald Kennedy

2008-02-02T12:00:00.000-08:00

Anybody of my generation (old enough to remember JFK) who watched that riveting scene at American University a week ago had to be affected, if only because it's been so long since we saw a quorum of Kennedys all in one place without a funeral or a criminal proceeding involved. Chris Matthews of MSN's Hardball called Ted Kennedy a "King Arthur" figure.

The associations came fast and randomly. When I saw Caroline, I thought of John John reminiscing that they had played under the Monica Lewinsky desk.

I thought of all the Kennedys missing from that campaign dais, and how they should have set up empty stools for Bobby, murdered by an immigrant who brought his Old World grudges to America with him, JFK, murdered by a Communist for God knows what reason, Jackie, felled by cancer, and John Jr., who lost his way in bad weather and fatally crashed his plane. I wondered how each of them would have felt about endorsing Obama in a contested primary.

Any time I think of John Jr., I remember his quip in Chicago several years ago that he had come to visit the scene of two of the Kennedy family's most important purchases: Merchandise Mart and the 1960 presidential election.

Any time I think of Jackie, I remember Gorbachev's reply to a Western reporter, filtered through a translator, when the reporter asked him "what effect do you think it would have had on history if, in 1963, President Krushchev had been assassinated instead of President Kennedy?"

"It's very difficult to say," Gorbachev stammered, and did as much as he could to excuse his obvious unpreparedness for the question, then brightened and delivered the immortal retort: "However, it's probably safe to say that Onassis would not have married Mrs. Krushchev."

Okay, now down to the business at hand, which is comparing and contrasting Sen. Obama and the late President Kennedy. I will alternate comparisons and contrasts in this post, but you can use any format you like in Comments. Parallel columns, paragraphs, whatever. Have some fun with it, if you like. Anything from the prosaic to the picaresque. Just no racism, no profanity, and no flaming, please.

Comparison

Both are big-city ethnic politicians with Old Country family connections.

Contrast

Kennedy was born into a large, stable family under the same roof, provided by parents who stayed married for life. Obama's father abandoned the family when Barak was two. He had an Indonesian stepfather briefly, and a younger half-sister was born of that marriage. He was raised by his grandparents after his mother died. His father produced African half-siblings to Barak after he abandoned his American family and returned to his native Kenya.

Comparison

Neither man has ever been poor.

Contrast

As a junior Naval officer in World War II, Kennedy served in the South Pacific campaign against the Japanese. The hero of P.T. 109, he was awarded the Navy Cross and Montgomery Clift later portrayed him in a feature biopic. Obama has never served.

Comparison

Both were extraordinarily "green" on foreign policy, despite spending part of their childhoods overseas. Kennedy was quickly tested by the Soviet Union, resulting in the Cuban Missile Crisis nuclear brinksmanship. Obama's bravado about a hypothetical invasion of Pakistan, followed by a flip-flop, certainly attracted attention from our adversaries. He will be "tried."

Contrast

Obama appears to be a solid husband. Kennedy was a "hound," a serial adulterer whose personal staff and secretary procured suitable women for his afternoon delight, and occasionally had to detain Jackie outside the Oval Office when she arrived unexpectedly.

Comparison

Both men attended elite prep schools and had stellar academic careers at Harvard.

Contrast

Obama criticizes President Bush's decision to invade Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Kennedy criticized President Truman's failure to support Chiang Kai-shek in China.

Comparison

Both men are sharp dressers.

Contrast

Kennedy's Irish-American identity was obvious and inescapable. His Boston pronunciation was authentic. Obama's biracial multicultural heritage is ambiguous, and his self-identification as a Black American is a conscious act of will. The Hawaii-raised Harvard lawyer's Black American speech patterns are affected and intentional.

Comparison

Both men are portrayed as athletic by the media. Obama is reported to play basketball with staffers; Kennedy was often photographed playing touch football with extended family.

Contrast

The Catholic Kennedy would almost certainly have objected to abortion on demand. Obama has never met an abortion he didn't like, including partial-birth abortion, in which a viable human baby is partially delivered through the birth canal, then stabbed in the skull with scissors, which are then opened to create a hole in which a suction catheter is inserted to suck out the brains and collapse the skull, at the mother's request.

Comparison

Both ran against and debated more experienced, accomplished legislators in the primary. Kennedy ran against Lyndon B. Johnson, Senate Majority Leader and peerless master of the legislative process. Obama is running against Hillary R. Clinton, generally regarded as a hard-working, capable journeyman in the U.S. Senate. Both Johnson and Clinton pointedly remarked on their junior opponents' respective experience deficits.

Contrast

Kennedy was an avid amateur sailor; Obama was a surfer.

Comparison

Both men are assured of winning Cook County (Chicago), Illinois.

Contrast

Obama can win Cook County fair and square, without electoral fraud by the Daly machine.

Comparison

Both men had bases of solid, almost tribal bloc support. In Kennedy's case, it was Catholics, in Obama's, it is Black Americans. Media elites raised no objections to this, but were highly sensitive to tribalism among white Protestants in 1960 and among white males in 2008, describing it as bigotry.

Contrast

Obama appears to be in good health, aside from his cigarette habit. Kennedy was a medical wreck who was hospitalized 36 times and received last rites three times.

Comparison

Both men are considered charismatic, and experienced "Rock Star" adulation from people who are generally uninterested in issue politics. Their emphasis is on image and youth. Kennedy felt he represented the generation "born in this (20th) century."

Contrast

Kennedy was born into the Catholic Church. Obama opted into the United Church of Christ.

Comparison

Both men polled well among professional academics.

Contrast

Obama's mother died young. Kennedy's mother survived him and lived to 100.

Comparison

Both men's religion became an issue during national elections.

Contrast

Kennedy was pressured to distance himself from the Catholic Church. Obama was pressured to swear devotion to his church.

Comparison

Both men claimed a Christian spiritual confidante.

Contrast

Kennedy's Catholic family confessor was theologically orthodox (small o) Cardinal Francis Spellman. Obama's confidante is Afrocentric Rev. Jeremiah Wright of the United Church of Christ, which ordains gay ministers, favors gay marriage and is hostile to Israel. The website of Obama's congregation in Chicago says "We are an African people, and remain 'true to our native land,' the mother continent, the cradle of civilization." It lists a 10-point Vision, #4 of which is "a congregation with a non-negotiable commitment to Africa." It is a congregation 10) "working towards economic parity" and committed to 7) "the historical education of African people in diaspora," 8) "liberation" and 9) "restoration." Rev. Wright, who appears to be preoccupied with Black grandeur, has issued a grandiloquent paean to Nation of Islam jew-baiter Louis Farrakhan.

Comparison

Both men wrote bestselling books. Obama wrote The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, a memoir. Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage.

Contrast

Obama's father, lamentably, lacked the "juice" (connections) to arrange a Pulitzer prize for his book. Kennedy was better blessed in this respect.

ALRIGHTY THEN...

Time for you to contribute your comparisons and contrasts in Comments. Remember, no racist stuff and no flaming. Have fun.